Cary Fukunaga Doesn't Mind Taking Notes from Netflix's Algorithm

Cary Fukunaga isn't entirely sure if he has a reputation for being difficult. But it's something he's heard from time to time. He heard it, obliquely, in the wake of shooting HBO's True Detective—a show that became a phenomenon following the fourth episode, which included a virtuosic, six-minute-long, unbroken tracking shot of Matthew McConaughey stalking his way through a robbery that turns into a bloodbath. Some people, such as the show's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, thought Fukunaga was being willfully idiosyncratic just for insisting on a shot like that. "Nic wanted to cut it up in post-production," Fukunaga says over lunch on a humid summer afternoon in New York, where he lives and where he's currently finishing Maniac, a surrealist Netflix series starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone as two patients in a pharmaceutical drug trial. "He did not like that I was pushing for that one at all." But the show had been a lot of talking, and a lot of philosophizing, before that. "I mean, there's nothing really that inventive about" True Detective, Fukunaga says. "It's just another crime drama." Fukunaga wasn't trying to showboat. He just thought: "Let's do something fun."

And then there was It, the 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, which Fukunaga wrote and was prepared to direct. He ultimately decided to leave the project two weeks before it was due to start shooting. For reasons that still aren't entirely clear to him, the studio started treating Fukunaga like he might go rogue. "I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn't control me."

And...were they right?

"No, they thought they couldn't control me. I would have been a total collaborator. That was the kind of ridiculous part. It was just more a perception. I have never seen a note and been like, Fuck you guys. No way. It's always been a conversation."

He rolls his eyes. "I don't think I've ever been able to make something uncompromising. Like, someone commented on Beasts”—Beasts of No Nation, the film about child soldiers that he adapted in 2015 from the novel of the same name—“Oh, how did it feel to make a movie that's uncompromising? Like, uncompromising? I had to rewrite my entire third act ’cause we didn't have the money to finish the film. We compromise all over the place."

The irony, to Fukunaga's mind, was that he'd worked hard to apprentice himself. To be humble about what he did and didn't know. In 2009, for instance, he signed on to direct a new adaptation of Jane Eyre. At the time, he was 32 and coming off his first film, a border thriller called Sin Nombre, which had won a directing prize at Sundance. Before that he'd been a professional snowboarder, and then a production assistant in Los Angeles, working poolside while Destiny's Child shot their video for "Survivor," and stone outcrop–side while Britney Spears shot "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman." Fukunaga is a romantic, and Jane Eyre appealed to that part of him; it was also a relatively conventional studio film, with movie stars (Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska), fancy costumes, and well-known source material. Fukunaga wanted to prove that he could handle—even excel at—a movie like that. "It was a pretty straightforward film. There was nothing experimental about it. But for me, it was an exercise."

The exercise worked. Fukunaga's Jane Eyre was taut, glossy, a bit haunted—a success, and a calling card, and almost immediately, people called. His next project was True Detective, which made him a household name, in households that pay attention to directors. But Fukunaga only experienced the acclaim secondhand: He was already gone, in Ghana, making Beasts of No Nation. That movie nearly killed him—he was stricken with malaria while preparing to shoot—but after he finished it, Netflix bought the film for $12 million. As Fukunaga looked around for his next project, he was doing so as one of the most sought-after directors in all of Hollywood.

That was nearly four years ago.

Then It fell apart (Fukunaga kept a screenwriting credit) and another project, an adaptation of The Alienist, kept getting delayed and he had to walk away from that, too, and all the while he was working to compromise, working to just get something made. He was supposed to be, maybe already was, our next great director. And then: "Between directing Beasts of No Nation and directing Maniac, it was three and a half years of no production," Fukunaga says, shaking his head. Time "vaporized. Just gone. And without a break. I was working the entire time." He continues: "You're like, 'I'm in the prime of my directing life.' That's a long time."

A few years ago, Fukunaga bought a house upstate, in order to be closer to the polo horse he stables there. He is aware of how this sounds: "It sounds bougie as fuck." Usually, he doesn't even mention to people that he plays polo. "It gives them the wrong impression," he says. He got interested in riding while shooting Jane Eyre, when all the actors got horses except for the director, who was forbidden from riding for insurance reasons. But Fukunaga is athletic by inclination—long after he quit professional snowboarding, he did capoeira, until that, too, took too much of a toll on his body—and adventurous by nature. After Jane Eyre wrapped, he took riding lessons of his own and swiftly mastered it to the point that his instructor recommended polo. Now he plays weekly with a bunch of hedge fund guys. "It's competitive," Fukunaga says. "Like, on the other team yesterday, one of the guys got so angry he swung his mallet and knocked over the goal post and got kicked out."

Fukunaga has not been a professional athlete in more than 15 years, but he still occasionally thinks about what it was like to snowboard for a living. "It's a beautiful thing, the human body in movement," he says earnestly. From the beginning, Fukunaga's films have been particularly attentive to just this, the way humans move through their surroundings; how the living, breathing places his characters inhabit shape and constrain who they are. In Sin Nombre, a startlingly prescient film about what happens when a wayward MS-13 gang member and a Honduran family fleeing to the U.S. border intersect, Fukunaga's camera delves into his characters’ bedrooms or hangouts, moving as they move, looking around corners, constantly expanding the frame. Sin Nombre, which was written and shot in Spanish, had a sense of place, and a kind of empathy, that signaled to anyone watching that Fukunaga was a natural filmmaker. It was also a sign that Fukunaga, the Bay Area–born son of a Swedish-American mother and a Japanese-American father who spent his early childhood in an American internment camp, had a different set of concerns than most young, aspiring filmmakers coming of age at the dawn of the modern superhero film.

Fukunaga tends to downplay the effect his background and upbringing had on him as a director. "Usually, people are just watching football when the family's together," he says, shrugging. The fact that he made a film about MS-13 long before we had a president who was seemingly obsessed with the gang does not strike Fukunaga—who studied history and political science as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz—as particularly remarkable. "It's bizarre, because they really aren't the most powerful gang or the most dangerous gang," he says, sighing. "Most Americans don't bother to read 20 years back in history."

Fukunaga doesn't spend much time discussing politics in the age of Trump—"There's nothing new to say right now," he says—but he also readily acknowledges the connective tissue between most of the things he's made, which tend to be about what happens to people and places after the more powerful have come and gone. "It's all the same thing," he says, referring to the worlds of Sin Nombre and Beasts. "Basically, from the age of discovery through colonialism, exploitation of foreign land for the mineral wealth, continued political destabilization to exploit that wealth and line the pockets of local families who dominate the political spectrum until they're overthrown, oftentimes with revolutions, which then themselves become corrupt, because of the culture it's been embedded in, but also through continued Western power, influence, and meddling." He says all this in the same cheerful surfer tone he says everything else in.

Taking a break from this stuff ended up being part of the appeal of Maniac, Fukunaga says. "You get to explore another thing. Explore the human mind instead."

Onscreen, Emma Stone is rushing down a hallway, murdering men in black suits. "She does something weird with her hand there," Fukunaga says to his digital-effects engineer. He's lying on a couch inside a post-production facility on lower Broadway, in the deeply slumped posture of an adolescent boy playing video games, wearing sandals and a T-shirt. His hair, which was braided into two startling plaits when he accepted the Emmy for best director for True Detective, is shorter now. "The luminosity of the muzzle flash on the mini gun looks weird," he says, and yawns. He's been working on Maniac, without a real break, since the show began shooting last fall. "I'm pretty burnt out at this point," he says. In the background, Jonah Hill is screaming in a weird falsetto: "I killed lots of men!"

Maniac is loosely—and I use the word "loosely" loosely—based on a Norwegian TV show of the same name. The original is a black comedy that follows the colorful and ridiculous delusions of a man locked in a psych ward. That was Fukunaga's starting point: He wanted to do something lighter—bright-colored candy, starring two multiple-Oscar nominees, from a director who'd spent most of his career telling stories about border violence, serial killers, and child soldiers.

But it turns out "lighter" is not exactly something Fukunaga is capable of. "I realized that I have a tendency to make things harder than they need to be. Having fun with genre and not worrying too much about production value went out the door the moment I started conceiving of ideas," Fukunaga says. The show he ultimately made, which he co-wrote with the author and screenwriter Patrick Somerville, takes place in a grimy, melancholy New York and focuses on two broken people, in Stone and Hill, trying to connect with their pasts and each other—when they're not hallucinating. And sometimes even when they are.

He's been closeted in this post-production facility for months now, with Beasts of No Nation and True Detective posters on the wall—"They switch the posters out every day before I get here," he says wryly—just trying to finish what is one of the more delightfully strange and idiosyncratic projects you'll ever see executed by a director this talented. The show feels like a John Lennon solo album, or a guided meditation by Terry Gilliam, or both at the same time. Fukunaga's Maniac retains the odd jolt of humor—at one point, a character finds herself at the Brooklyn Public Library Bus Terminal—and ultimately plays with a variety of stylish genres, but at root it's about two lonely, shattered people seeking absolution and connection. "Patrick and I had this moment where we were like, Remember when we thought this was supposed to be fun?"

He slumped deeper in the couch as the hours went by. The whiplash of it all—the years of failed projects, of arguments with various studios about what he could and couldn't do—was catching up to him. At the beginning, his manager had made the show sound easy, Fukunaga says: " 'You can stay in New York, work with who you want to work with, and play with any genre you want to play with.' And especially after not shooting for years, you're like, That sounds kind of cool. What could that be?"

But that question turned out to be harder to answer than Fukunaga first anticipated. Three months before Maniac was due to go into production, he and Somerville threw away half their scripts and started over. He did this, he says, of his own volition. "That was me. I was saying this wasn't good enough. We need to look at this again and tear it apart and go again." In the original drafts, the hallucinations—explorations of other worlds, in which Jonah Hill might play, say, a Long Island house husband in a Warren Moon jersey—were not very present. "I was like, 'The whole joy in this is to be able to play with different worlds and we're not doing that. So we need to figure out a way to make that happen.' "

How did the people you were working with react to you starting over?

"Everyone was concerned. It made it hard to budget, it made it hard to schedule. But it was the right move." He shot the show in the fall of last year, finishing in December. "The next day I was in post," he says.

Like Beasts, Maniac will stream on Netflix, which has its own surreal development process. "Because Netflix is a data company, they know exactly how their viewers watch things," Fukunaga says. "So they can look at something you're writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it's a different kind of note-giving. It's not like, Let's discuss this and maybe I'm gonna win. The algorithm's argument is gonna win at the end of the day. So the question is do we want to make a creative decision at the risk of losing people."

What's an example of that?

"There was one episode we wrote that was just layer upon layer peeled back, and then reversed again. Which was a lot of fun to write and think of executing, but, like, halfway through the season, we're just losing a bunch of people on that kind of binging momentum. That's probably not a good move, you know? So it's a decision that was made 100 percent based on audience participation."

Fukunaga treated the process as one more thing to learn from, he says. "It was an amazing exercise. It will be even more amazing to see people's reaction to the show. I have no doubt the algorithm will be right." But it also made him want to do what, contrary to popular belief, he hadn't done yet. "I just kind of want to make something that's idiosyncratically all mine," Fukunaga says. He says he realized the other day that he hadn't had a film in wide theatrical release since Jane Eyre. "It's crazy," he says. "I could be a complete failure in the box office. I have no idea."

But people still seem willing to bet on him. He remains an executive producer on True Detective, though that doesn't mean much at this point. "There was a discussion about maybe doing, like, franchising it and having multiple director-writer teams as a true anthology, and I was like, Fuck yeah! Great idea. You know, it just hasn't happened." He's been working on a project with HBO, based on Stanley Kubrick's unproduced film about Napoleon, and another thing about Hiroshima, and yet another thing about Alexandre Dumas. Would any of it actually happen? There was no way to know. But the process, so far, had been amicable.

"I've only walked out of one project where a producer was like, You're never gonna work in this town again!" Fukunaga says, walking me to the elevator. "When he said that, I was like, Did he say that? I want to record this!"

Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.

Styling by Tony Irvine / Hair by Silvia Cincotta / Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer / Produced by Donna Belej at Allswell Productions

This story originally appeared in the September 2018 issue with the title "Fall Fashion: The Director's Cut."