Cary Fukunaga talks True Detective and why he exited Stephen King’s It

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

It's been some time since Cary Fukunaga's last project graced our screens, but that will all change when his upcoming mini-series Maniac will be released on Netflix next month. After his stellar work on the first season of HBO's True Detective as well as BEASTS OF NO NATION, Fukunaga was pursued for a variety of projects, but unfortunately, they just didn't seem to work out with him involved, resulting in a lot of wasted time.

"Between directing Beasts of No Nation and directing Maniac, it was three and a half years of no production," Fukunaga told GQ in a recent interview. "Vaporized. Just gone. And without a break. I was working the entire time. You're like, 'I'm in the prime of my directing life.' That's a long time." One of the projects which Cary Fukunaga worked on during this period was an adaptation of Stephen King's IT, which the director stepped away from two weeks before they were due to start shooting. The relationship between the studio and Fukunaga turned south the further the project went along, and he told GQ that they started treating him as though he could go rogue at any moment. "I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn't control me," Fukunaga said, before clarifying that their assumption would have been wrong.

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. I don't think I've ever been able to make something uncompromising. Like, someone commented on Beasts, '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.

Although part of me is still left wondering what Cary Fukunaga's vision for IT would have been, the film we did get from Andy Muschietti was quite fantastic.

As for True Detective, the HBO series scripted by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga, much has been written about the apparent tensions between the two men during production, and Fukunaga said that he had to fight for some of the series' best moments, such as the six-minute long tracking shot from the fourth episode in which Matthew McConaughey's character escaped a robbery gone bad. Nic Pizzolatto believed that Cary Fukunaga was being "willfully idiosyncratic" for insisting on shooting the sequence that way and Fukunaga said that Pizzolatto even wanted to cut it up in post-production.

"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."

Maniac will debut on Netflix on September 21, 2018.