This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. My guest today is director, writer, and cinematographer Carrie Fucanaga. Fukanaga produced and directed Season one of HBO's moody, unsettling, and highly successful crime drama True Detective, set in and around New Orleans.
He has three feature films under his belt as well, shot in Mexico, England, and Ghana. For Carrie Fucanaga, each production is as unique as the shooting location itself. Every movie so far has been so different in that sense, in the same way like every relationship is different. There are general things of the same, you know, film to film.
But my first movie was such bliss in terms of the the general passion of the crew and how much everyone sort of filled in the gaps with number first number yeah, and then Jane Eyre was like, you know, it was like a mercenary army where eleven hours and fifty nine minutes people are ready to pull the plug and go Home. It took me about half of that film to win over the crew, and I think it was necessary. I think you need the crew on your side.
So yes, there's a there's a level of it. But that's also why you start surrounding yourselves with the same head to department so that you don't have to win them over. They get it, and then they're sort of loyalty and there's your people. There are your people, and they're loyalty and enthusiasm sort of trickles down. The number was at a short film that was made into a studio film correct or a future film. Yeah. The Shore
was a slightly different story, but same world. It was about a truckload of immigrants that were abandoned in South Texas and it was a refrigerated trailer, so a lot of them suffocated to death, very similar to what happened just last summer in Austria. You went to n y U Film School and we went to grad from where did you go unto grow when? To Santa Cruz for history and uh, a little bit of political science. I went for a year to to a political science institute
in Grenoble. Friends, and you grew up in northern California from the East Bay. Um, but I've lived all around the Bay area, moved every couple of years, So I did a kind of a ring around the Bay Area. But then when I go home to God and your father or both your parents were born in an internment camp or on one of them was my dad was he was born in an internament He and my uncles are born. He was born in Topas, my uncles were
born in Tule Lake. Because my family were no knows, which means they signed no to uh two questions the US government posed all Japanese Americans put in these camps. One was do you first swear citizenship or a legiance to your birth country or your country of your race, which is Japan. And then the second question is where you fight in the U. S. Military? And if you answer no to both those questions, you were sent to this other camp, which was sort of under martial law
the entire war. That's where your father was. Did as you talk much about that or has he? I think he was like three when he left. And then the Japanese were moved to sort of ghetto if you will, in Richmond in the Bay Area, and from there they sort of worked and moved out within the next couple of years. Your mother Japanese, so she's you know, Middle
American Swedish heritage. You know you're Japanese and Swedish basically, Yeah, describe to me when you do a film and you come in there, what you feel the job is, what, what is the task? I had a conversation with Afonsi quar own right before I went into Jane Eyre, and it was the first time I would be directing a screenplay that I didn't write myself, and he said something really simple but very important, which was, Uh, your job as a director is not to just illustrate somebody's screenplay.
Your job is to make it something entirely different. And I think it's just really good advice because I think many people are very precious about writing. Writing the essential especially for dialogue and general story and plot. But the screenplay, in terms of cinema and movie making, is really just a starting point. It's a it's a floor plan where the finishing work is going to come, you know, much later.
So I look at it as trying to figure out what my unified vision is going to be, what the overall emotion emotional impact of the story is and what state I want the audiences to be in when they're done. So when you go from Sinnombre to you're on the set directing Judy dench s out of that field, it was I was very aware that she had already at that point, I had done more movies than I will ever do in three of my life. So she kind
to you, super kind. She has in mind direction, she likes direction and wants wants to make the director happy. And that made it a lot easier because at first I wasn't sure what I could say to where prior to that had really only been directing, uh, non professional actors. You graduated from n y you graduate film school when well, technically I haven't graduated yet, but you attended there when two thousand two to four or five, And when you had left Santa Cruz with your did you get a
degree in history? Yeah? When you left, I wasn't sure if you didn't finish the arrival when you know, I don't want to want to assume anything now, But when you left Santa Cruz with a degree in history and you went to n y U, how did that happen? Meaning? What what what what made you want to go to a graduate film program. Well, I think I wanted to
do movies for a long time. Started writing my first shorts when I was like ten, my first you had the bug before, I had the bug before, and you know, saved up on its fourteen to buy a video camera. I would write stories and and then in college I think I decided to pursue snowboarding and sports as a career and potentially, you know, be a professional snowboarder. And by the time I was one, I was starting to
realize that might be a really impossible dream. At that point, usually if you're not like on the A team by age seventeen or eighteen, you're never gonna catch up. So I started to write stories again. I thought about getting at the major at Santa Cruise and Film, and I went and talked to the head of department, and he made it seem like I had to be there two more years to study film, and I wasn't gonna stay in Santa Cruise, so I be I Basically I trialed for a bit and then I went down to l
A and started crewing. It was the first movie you crewed him, the first big production I did a couple of indies around the Bay Area, but the first production I showed up on in Los Angeles was a pick up shoot for Destiny's Child Survivor a zooma beach. It was amazing. I mean, like, first of all, I didn't have to pick up a cigarette, butts, I had a pretty cool job. I was on the camera truck and so I was right up there with a cinematographer and
watching uh, you know, Beyonce dour thing. It was a video. It was a video. I mainly worked on music videos and commercials out there, features like some indie features that I don't think ever won anywhere y n Y. You, I mean as a native of California and even northwere which I'm always mystified with natives of Central or Northern California league because it's so beautiful there. I mean, l A, I can see you wanted to get out of there
because it's so crowded. But but the y n Y. I think, especially if you're from the East Bay like Oakland and Berkeley, Brooklyn is very analogous as cities and the multi cultural yeah yeah or not or or also I mean, you just want to be in a place Uh, there's a there's an urban side to the Bay Area that you like, even with San Francisco being a very small, big city but still a big city that I grew
up with that Los Angeles didn't have. And I think also when you grew up in Northern California, you grew up with a sort of natural antagonism for the Southern California that most Southern Californias aren't even aware of. So it's like when you're in college for the first time together. The Southern California has had no idea that Northern Californias didn't like in them. In the Northern California's really we have no reason not to like them, except we were
just raised not like the South for some reason. It's like in New York, we have an upstate downstate thing here too, So you come here? Did you take to New York? To you? Where do you live now? I live in the West Village, So you like New York? You took to it? I haven't been here almost fifteen years, so yeah, I've taken to it. And when you finished the n y you graduate program and according to your you know, you just press uh, you know, click on
the Internet, or where you where your career took you. Uh, there's a lot of time in between Sin Nombre and when you left the graduate film program. Correct, it seems like but if you think about the Chronologist. So my short was that I shot the short at the end of two thousand three. Uh. Started, I finished it by
the summer of two thousand and four. It was at Sundance in two thousand five, and then I was at the Sundance Writing Lab in two thousand and six, was making it in two thousand and seven, two eight, did post two nine it came out, So it seems four years go by. I squeeze the hell Nombre experience, wrote that thing for five years the Cooting Labs. So when you're done, done, done with that sin nobody has done what year? I finally finished it in two thousand and eight,
but it didn't come out until two thousand nine. The next thing for he was Jane Are in two thousand eleven. Correct. And what do you think it was that they hired you for to do that movie? Well, actually it was
they conveyed that to you. It wasn't really happening, and had been sitting on a shelf at the BBC for a while and I had a general meeting UM with the BBC executive and I just asked what they had and U, Jane Eyre was a project I was actually thinking about adapting while I was waiting for se Nomber to get the green light. So I had the six months off, you know, between thinking we're making it and having it pushed for like eight months, and I just wrote be some no nation at that time period and
by yourself. Yeah, I adapted the novel at the end of two thousand and six, and um, basically I was thinking about what else can I write while I'm waiting. I just I wanted to stay busy. And Jane Eyre was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid because my mom like the old black and white classics, so uh, Bob Stevens version with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles was like one of my childhood favorites, and I thought about adapting it and updating it. I had no
idea there were so many other adaptations out there. Zero when I sought it out at the BBC, I still didn't know it wasn't so I had signed there than there are Frank and Stein's out there basically, yeah and so uh or or Spider Man's or Heman the Hulks uh so. Yeah. So I was unaware of them, and then when I found out there were so many, I just consciously ignored them. But I sort of was the one that pulled it off the shelf again and brought to focus features. So it wasn't like they solicited in me.
I actually asked to read it, and then I met with al Snow and the producer. She asked what I would change on the screen plan, and I told the things I wanted to change, but essentially I felt it was pretty pretty good. I thought, but why that? Why did you want to do that? I wanted to do a period piece. I was a history major. I love history. One day, I want to do giant epics, you know, all the Lawrence of Arabia. So yeah, so that the
Jane Are for me was a primer. Was a way to show that I could do a period film, a classic film. Um, I see Norm Bray in many ways was still like my short film from college. And I believe in sort of studying classics before branching out and experimenting. And um, I thought, what did you learn on Jane here.
What were the learning curfew in the production? I think about acting, about cinema, cinematics, anything, all those things, because what I learned about was stillness, Like so much of contemporary cinema is filled with showmanship and pizzas and using visuals to hide for a lack of storytelling, And what I wanted to learn about was doing as little as possible and try to tell a compelling story in terms of the camera, in terms of the camera, in terms
of even uh, you know, the Bronze Charlet. Bronze in particular wrote really extensive dialogue scenes, and as a director, in a great dialogue scene, you're just there to observe because the actors are the ones doing all the work. You know, they're they're all the dramatic fireworks coming from them, and there's an impulse to try to do something because you're not really doing anything. They're not moving the camera.
You're not really able to to to shape that in any other way or manipulate it maybe is a better word. And what I learned there, and I talked to Alice known about it while we're shooting. I was just like, I don't feel like I'm doing anything all day and and she's like, it's fine, this is this is it's okay.
It's funny you say that because one of the first movies I made was Beetle Choices, and there was a woman named Linda Hendrickson who was my customer on the film, and they had summoned some of the people in to come look at the dailies the first couple of days to see how their stuff was looking on film, and I said, how did it look? And I wouldn't go to the dailies because I found it very unsettling. I said, how did Gina look? I said, because when I work
with Gina, she does almost nothing. It's almost if you wonder they say action and you wonder did she even hear them say action? And Linda said to me, oh my god, he said, she's incredible. Yeah, you know, because fort across and twenty ft high, the slightest little thing. It was just she said, she's so entertaining and you can't take her eyes off. You can't take your eyes
off her. Yeah, and that's that's uh. I think both Fastbender and Mia brought a lot of that, you know, stillness, stillness, and you oftentimes can't see it even on the monitors when you're watching because of these tiny screens. But as since you start projecting that stuff, especially MEA's performance, there's just the veins in her neck and little things in her adjustments in her face or in her eyes that are coming from some central ootional place where so powerful.
And that wasn't me, that was her, you know. So when you come out of that, you do your history major from Santa Cruz, and you come out of that and you make this film, uh, this spronte novel, and what's the next thing for you, true detective? The first thing I thought to myself when I saw that, and I hadn't met you with because the show for people who don't know, when there were very few people who
don't know the show. It was ten episodes this season, the first the first season, and the first season was written by Nilto right, so Nick Pisolatto wrote the first season and you directed how many of the ten episodes? Eight episodes that I had directed all eight? It was so so season one was eight episodes and you did all eight, And so did you know that going in? Did they say to you from the get go, we want you to come and do all eight episodes of
the show, would you do a couple? And they went, Wow, we really like him, we want you to stay. The idea well, so I was there as part of the pitch, and the idea was it was getting like an anthology. Every year they'd bring in Were you were there as part of the pitch. How we packaged We packaged it within anonymous content. Nick's a writer there, I'm a director, right. What what made them want the guy from Jane Eyre to come to the searing, violent, blood spattered insane. What
did you think they saw on you? I actually have I've never asked that question. I should sit down to Steve Golan and ask them. Um never occurred to you, never occurred to me. I was just we had conversations about at ideas. UM, I need the color of how I'd want to treat it. I love the idea of of sort of a neo noir um and uh. I was more than anything. I was excited about genre shifting again and not staying over the show. Was it HBO
because Hbos were hands on? Yeah, you mean in terms of bringing in Matthew and Woody, Right, what happened there was you could have your pick up a lot of actors. It was, it was. It was actually a really good time because that was right after Janey had come out and basically in the same thing, the same with Jane Ayre, like Fast Spender and Mea were my first choices. So I God, I just had conversations with him, you know, and then through the conversations they signed on the same
thing with Dame Judy. Everyone said, you're not You're not gonna get Judy to be in this, and I wrote her just a little note and and just sort of very lucky. I'm very lucky. I'm aware of this. By
the way. They're good, but you're lucky and good but but but so, any time I saw a man with a beard who seemed like that kind of crispy biker gang crowd that McConaughey goes back to get high and reconnect with, improved himself with by getting like Superstone, those are some of the best Stone scenes I've ever seen in my life ever. I mean, I was getting a
contact high just watching it. And then every time I saw a guy with a beard, I wanted to run up and break a chair over his face, or run in the opposite direction crying like you put the fear of God in me bye bye, by the madness and then the real interiority of those guys. I don't know how I didn't do that. I don't know. I mean I was trying to. I was wondering if you're going there and I think about that, you know, if you
emotionally to well. I try to think about the movies we watch, say an action film right where it's filled with all these sort of big set pieces. Uh, and uh, you know that the body count is extremely high, and why is it. We can watch that and laugh and you know, popcorn, it doesn't really affect us. But then a movie with like where one person is killed can
just you know, we can't shake the image. I I try to think about that in terms of like what I'm going for for execution, in terms of the mood or tone of a scene, or even the impact of something violent in the story. Maybe sometimes just the banality of it, you know, through through again the stillness and not trying to over sell something. It's the seduction of
thinking everything is normal when it's it's not. You know what I loved about your show for the most part, Uh, it was numbingly we all those scenes where McConaughey goes back to that group and tries to befriend those guys and everything that goes on there, through the shooting and the killing and the kind of the Feu salah that takes place in then the old Bolt. The only question I have so whose idea was it from mcconnie to
keep cutting open the soda can all the time? That was definitely next idea because it was And then I want to register that complain because I thought, if he cuts one more fucking soda can, I was just talking about continuity, man, that was a pain. And the smoking and the kind of the characteristican through smoking and cutting the soda can. I thought, okay, we've had a bit
about enough of that right now. And the other thing is that I will say that also made it so great other than your work, and I really mean that you did an amazing job, is how much I worship Wouldy. I'm a complete You tell me what he's in the movie, I'm there. I worship Woody. He's some people just have that magic. There's no one else in the world like Woody Harrilson. There is not, And uh, you know that that's what he he brought to the scenes to He's like,
he's got a special energy and he's got everything. It's uh, and you never know it's gonna be. It's unforgettable. He masculine, he's playful, he's intelligent, he's loopy. Did you enjoy working with him? Yeah? No, I mean he was. I enjoyed not only what he was doing on screen, but just sort of his energy just on setting around. He said, how long did it take to shoot the eight episodes? Uh? Did they leave you alone and you want a decent amount of time? Or was it tight? It was pretty tight.
It was pretty tight. We were every day. It was pretty stressful. Uh. We shot it in a hundred days. So what does that work out too, It's a little bit more than twelve days in an episode? Yeah, Um, where did you shoot Louisiana outside of New Orleans? And puts a lot about all of it, wrote the whole thing, and how much were Woody or McConaughey or your other people allowed to do some alterations that do some alternate takes, alternate lines. That was definitely in the in the shaping
of the narrative. Is a lot of collaboration early on and then I think Woody and Matthew wood He definitely brought humor into it for both characters and made sure that the the interplay between the two guys was more balanced and fair. Earlier drafts, I think the Cole character, Matthew McConaughey's character, uh, was just sort of just spewing out stuff and and and his wife was played by Michelle Michelle Monahan. I couldn't believe You've got Michelle Monahan
to do that sex scene with McConaughey. I was stunned. Yeah, well, I thought Michelle Monte had no she would never you here. She was having a very you know, like almost hardcore sex scene with him. I thought, my god, I think we only did one take of that one too. That was an intensely hope. So, yeah, that was a really
intense scene. And I was obviously trying to be sensitive to Michelle um and what was her attitude about doing that, because it's interesting and this day in time, I find that women nowadays it's like it's like, let's not even go there, let's not give it. It's it's tough because there was three different girls that had to do sex scenes in this show. And my first movie. There was kind of a sex scene, but I was really uncomfortable. I couldn't even ask the girl to take her top off.
You know, I just felt really out of place there and it's not fun. It's just a it's a strange need to be a guy with them. If you said, sit down with her in the makeup, t learned the producer and kind of described we're looking for it definitely has to be character based, and I think Michelle understood both for the wood he's seen when they're as a couple married, how they come back together at that point
in the dramatic arc of their relationship. The sex scene was important to show that connection, to show it still exists. And then later on the sex scene with Matthew was sort of essential for understanding the split between them and how she drove it. But she down for that though, Yeah, well is there some kind of this is part of directing? Yeah, what was so Matthew again, it's very He's very planned
and he has ideas for things. So you know Matthews like, well, first I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do this. He choreographs the whole thing, and you have to Basically it's like a partner dance and Michelle and then we pull Michelle side, like are uk with all of these things, And Michelle always had every every girl had the cut call, so they know they're allowed to call cut in situation like that. And they had to feel comfortable to be
able to call cut. That's also a big thing. You can say that and then they still feel like, oh there, I'm not going to be the show. Never call cut? Or did she call cut twenty seven times? Well, we only did on the Matthew Day. We only did that one taken and on What He's I think we did too, and she called cut both times. Right, Yeah. Fucanaga created an atmosphere on the set of True Detective that allowed
his actors to give exceptional performances. Both McConaughey and Harrilson were nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor's Guild Award. Explore the Here's the Thing Archives where I speak to director William Friedkin about his unorthodox casting process Roy Scheider When I cast and he said, don't you want me to read for this part? I said, there's nothing to read. The guy goes, uh, get your hands up. Get what what is that? Who wants to listen to that?
In a in a goddamn conference room? You know, take a listen at Here's the Thing dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. My guest today is director, writer, and cinematographer Carrie Fucanaga. His latest feature film, Beasts of No Nation, depicts the horrors of a civil war in an unnamed West African country. Critically acclaimed for its story, direction, and acting, the film, however,
did not get a single Academy Award nomination. There's a couple of things going against us, which was not having a major studio with its sort of locked in oscar voters who released the film. Netflix released the film having Netflix as a perceived online only game players the TV show that was a TV movie. I think subject matter we knew. I know most people would discover it once all the voting was done, and and and still a bulk would never see it ever in the future. So
I think we thought it was a long shot. Netflix learned a lot from that experient ands about how they're going to do that differently from No One, I hope. So you know, we have. We have yet to have a real fall up conversation like would you like to Yeah, and I have ideas, but they also you know, the game is changing in terms of how people consume movies. The awards aren't going to immediately reflect that. They're still gonna be looking over here. You know. It's and and
I and I say this with all honesty. This is not out of like, well, I don't care, it's I actually haven't watched the Academy Awards. And over ten years, you didn't watch the Academy Awards when I hosted with Steve Martin in two thousand and ten. What you meant to say was that in two thousand and ten you made an exception. Yeah, when you watched the one that
I hosted. I watched it pirated, you watched it. I stopped watching it around film school because we'd have these kind of these pools, see who'd win the Oscars, and I would always lose the pool. Like I voted were terrible. I was terrible. I always voted for the films that I thought deserved it. And clearly that's just not a word. And that's when I kind of got that sense of it. Then and then then over the years, and I saw the films that were being nominated, I just had zero interest.
I really did. And uh, but that doesn't mean that when you're not nominated, you're not like, you know, feeling the burn, because it's like not being picked for, you know, the little league baseball team. And you wonder why people who were voting, they have no opportunity, They have no hope of seeing everything that's out there, even everything good. People are playing telephone. Somebody calls up somebody and says,
what do you like? And there are people who move little bundles of voters in a certain direction, and and and those people are old guard Hollywood, their studio Hollywood, and they'll be in touch with people who it's like it's like it's like a chain. And that person then is in touch with people who are costume designers and set designers and do different jobs who haven't made a movie in twenty five years. And membership in the Academy is there one lifeline to the industry still that they
take very seriously. And that's been a problem for years. And your situation is emblematic of the fact that it's only getting worse, only getting worse. Yeah, I don't know. I mean the reforms are trying to talk about, I'm not informed enough about how to make it more diverse or make it more reflective our society in our world now. Because there's also a part of any art and any guilt that is about protecting the legacy and protecting you know, uh,
the rights of former members of their industry. You know that you can't just strip away membership. But maybe there's a another way to to to weigh it. I don't know. It's just because you you you want to believe like health insurance, you know, or social security that you know you've put a lifetime into this industry, that you know, until you die you'll still be respected. There's an annuity
there for you. Um, you said you wrote the screen pie, you adapted the screenplay for Beasts of No Nation Win two six, you carried around for a while. It's been around, Yeah, it's only I didn't rewrite it until about six months before he started shooting The True Detective Help You get a job? No, I actually had to produces admiring of the TV show. I wondered it helped you, and um, you know it didn't even help in terms of pre sales. I had interests and and the show, and that didn't help.
What was the budget of you with my masking for the film? It was six million in Ghana, West Africa. You're not married, not married, you have no kids? No kids, so you could to Ghana for? How long you prepped for? How long I prepped there? Not long enough. I think we had about eight nine weeks of prep. I was down for about a week, had malaria. Right before he
started shooting. I was bedridden. Uh. I was able to get some final rewrites done to lock, you know, locked the script before I went into production, but I don't think I could ever do a project like that again. It definitely took a lot out of me. How did you find your lead actor? I had a casting director I brought out who was Avy Kaufman's son, Harrison Nesbit. He's He was twenty three when he came out there, pretty much fresh out of undergrad. He had helped out
on Life of Pie. I knew what I was looking for in terms of street casting. This wasn't something where we were going to be able to like make TV and radio announcements and get thousands of kids show up. I mean we were gonna have to go out in the neighborhoods and find these kids. And that's exactly what he did. And he got a small team mc nats together and they went every slip boys name again Abrahamatta see from. So he's from a neighborhood called Shiman. That's
kind of a poor neighbor. It's a working neighborhood in in Across. And uh had he acted before, He'd never really acted before. He did a couple of like you know in church, you know, some scenes in church from the battle you direct him. We did a kind of it was a boot camp, if you will, of acting about two weeks before he started shooting, at about thirty kids who were sort of finalists for all the rules,
and we just taught them the basics. You know, this wasn't gonna be something where they could just feel it out, like they needed some tools. You didn't have time. Yeah, they had to give him the structure, you know, and
exercises to Like. One of the things we had to kind of pull out of their toolbox was the sub opera style acting that they're used to a lot of them Nollywood films and the Gnaian version of Nollywood films are very uh Nigeria stuff, and I mean they're most the most prolific film producing country in the world, I think,
even more than India. Uh. But there's a style of acting there that's oftentimes very very big, and this film we wanted to pull it back, so a lot of it was rather than indicating an emotion, it was just trying to access the memory to feel it so much
more of a Strasbourg thing. And we did two weeks of that and and tried to work on a different sort of emotional beats he would go through and then in the movie and all the kids did because we had to see who was the one who was best at it, and Abraham just always came at it from a much more um, a smaller and much more sort of honest perspective. He was from the one from the go. It wasn't overacting. If anything, I had to pull it
more out of him. So it was it safe to say that you had a pool of young boys or he was twelve, and we shot the pool of kids, let's say around that age, and you weren't quite sure who would play the one who would play that leader would emerge from that pool because he had to because at that point, you know, Harrison and Stall over two thousand kids, and I had seen tape on a couple of hundred, and these were the top thirty. You know, we weren't going to find him anywhere. Did the shooting go.
It was hard because even on the first one was hard about everything, whether whether we didn't you don't even have radar there, you know, like in Louisiana we get rainstorms all the time, but you could look on the Doppler and see if it's gone in fifteen minutes or four hours. Who was your deep pay make plans? I was a DP. So Um, that wasn't the hard part. I mean it was physically strenuous. I think the hard part was that we just never had the money never
at the time. Soderberg is a much smarter guy than me, so he had that come before him. Um, but he shoots and stuff, yeah, I mean like it. He's a machine. You know, he can edit when he goes home, like I'm a cide work. I'm told from people he's a cidek. But but but why do you, uh you prefer it? I like shooting you did you do that? In the true Detective I've always been really involved in camera. It's just one of the things you operate, detective, and I didn't
like to operate. I don't want to like get involved in that level. I'd rather be pay attention to performance and not THEO didn't operate and be some onitiation. I wasn't supposed to operate. But our our steady cam operator who has our a cam operator, pulled his hamstring on the very first day, the first set up in the second take, and after that he couldn't move the camera. So I degree came in. It came in handy. They
we do everything there, you know, boom operating. Sometimes describe your lead actor to me, Abraham dress address address is actually I shouldn't say that, yeah, address, I shouldn't say the leader because because the other boy, the young boy, he is Abraham. He is very every mention the lead actors, it was a was that what is no such thing as a big actor as a small actors? Even Labraham's like four ft tall um but addresses, Uh, he's a force of nature. Where did you find him? I found
him through his work. Essentially. I was very aware of his work when I was about freedom to cast who you wanted to cast. It was you call it. You can call it freedom or the limitations of the subject he gave you about. We need a name we can raise money off of. I mean it just I mean, for me, it just is a name. He's a huge even we were that aside, no one came to you and said, well, here's another list. All right, Oh, Matthew McConaughey played this role Robert Daddy Jr. He's already done
that role. So, um yeah it. Dress was on a very very short list of actors, um maybe two and uh. And he was my first choice just based on the gravitas, the you know, the way you were describing Woody, where he's masculine, he's intention and he's sensitive. All those qualities he could he really in any in the all living at the same time in him. It's not like he's like changing colors like a wheel. He's he's they all exist, you know, coexist. And I needed someone that could pull
off that kind of uh. I don't want to call it gang leader, but that sort of uh town hall charisma, which is different than say, like a Mugabi the book he does in the movie how does he Die? He's shot by one of the soldiers in the very soon in the final encampment when they say goodbye to him, Yeah, one of them shoots him. Does it build to a head where he shoots him? Is he is he bullying them and he's taking the money on one of them shoots him. It's basically similar. There's just run down and
they have no goal anymore. Everything has sort of been a lie. And then one of the soldiers named Rambo shoots some kid and they're a teenager. Essentially, why didn't you do that in this? My first draft, I had Agu do it because I wanted Agu to take control of his destiny and make a choice and in some way vengeance for everything he's experienced. And then as I did my re right, I thought that was too easy.
It was to button up a neat way out of the story and that life, which I think in the banal sense we're talking about earlier, the more insiduously evil and frightening version is that he still exists out there like a shark and murky water. Yeah, in my version, he would have like something would have happened. I don't know what it would be. I'm not a good riding.
He would have tripped and phone on some Purmese tiger trapper and he obvious the kid to kill him to be had a man of his misery because it was one of those characters where I mean because that sex scene with him and the boy is so subtle and so quiet, and and and and he's you know, he's obviously he's high, and he's kind of blitz st out the character. And when that happens, everyone I was in the room where we were like, oh, I hope this guy does And the screen and the screenplay there wasn't
much more. There's a couple more lines in there that that kind of make it even more uncomfortable. And uh Idris was kind of he was the one in almost the we're talking earlier about sex scenes, He's the one like, I'm not comfortable going that far. I just can't do that. You know, a newborn child, he's got a daughter, young daughter. It's like that's just something I'm just I can't do. You don't want to go there, you can't go there. What are you working on now? I am working on
a mini series right now. I'm not going to direct the whole thing. It's a Caleb Cars the Alienist, just starting to do the casting part again. It kind of reminds me of when we're doing Detective because there's this exciting, uh step in that development process as you start figuring out who are the people who are going to make this come to life? And with each actor it's a totally different thing, you know, and when you kind of imagine them in these leading roles, it can you go
in different directions. It changes the way I want to write it. When you work with actors, do you feel because you seem very um sanguine, but when you go on the set now, do you feel intimidated when you have to deal with the crew and the actors? Or you feel very confident? Though? I think that the first
week confident enough, confident enough. The first week of shooting is always a bit wobbly as you try to figure out paced tone, figure out how you know to to communicate with people you're not comfortable with yet, and what you ultimately want is to get on a good sort of direct line, you know, but you never know what someone's limit is. You don't know when with an actor where they're gonna be irritated that you're just talking too much.
I thought that you would tell edge of four about this a little bit about the amazing actor and about self directing and when you start to do more projects and not getting especially if you've worked with greats who you know when the day is done, you know what you've done and and you don't need to go watch the dailies, uh, and you know what your character is onto next and how to jump in these new scenes. And and then you go into something else where you're
getting nothing. How do you survive those productions? And that's when you start this skin gets thicker and you just rely on yourself and you get confused. Yeah, well that's the part of the thicker skin comes from learning not to make that confusion make you feel insecure and effect
the performance, especially if you're operating on your own. I think for me, my style at least is what I've learned, uh is it's usually about the conversations before we start shooting, and if we if we're a hundred percent on the same page about who that character is, then every idea that comes out of the actual shooting is a continuation of that conversation. And it's not like you're just making up direction just to fill the space with more words.
You know, between takes because there is that stillness I was talking about in Jane Eyre where I learned where where I didn't have to say anything because we had talked about beforehand was working, so we can just move on. I remember when I was going to a friend of mine who was a producer, director, and writer, wanted me to do a movie which was based on a The character was a big ticket NBA basketball coach and he was friends with Pat Riley. And this is when Riley
was coaching the Knicks here in New York. And he took me out to facility up in New Pols where the team was training then. And then we got in the car and we went to Riley's home and had lunch with him, and I said to him, what's the job, what's the task? And he said, I have people who have been dominant in this sport since they were eight years old. He said, they were dominant in their peewee leagues, they were dominant in high school, college, they get into
the pros. He said, they've been dominating this game and playing thousands of basketball games for nearly two decades. And he goes, and my job is to walk into a room and make them care one more time? How do you make them care enough to go out there? And a lot of directors don't feel that they have that obligation that you know you're gonna come and you're getting paid all this money or whatever the bullshit is that
you know, you motivate yourself. And I wouldn't mind if the director came in every now and then and try to enlist me in the cause and say something. The last thing I want to say to you is, I mean again about a piasts of no Nation is whenever people talk to me about movies and they stole some movie they've seen, I always smiled and I said, well, let's calm down here because big questions. Would you watch the movie in you made an amazing movie. Thank you
made an incredible movie. When that boy goes running into that war, I was sobbing. I was sobbing. And I hope that, uh, you'll stick with your instincts, because your great instincts have gotten you where you are now. I did a small part in Warren Batties movie about Howard Used, and I said to myself, you know your problem is you don't make enough movies. You know he was too slow, And I'll say the same thing to you. Don't stop making movies, keep making moneys, don't take too much time off,
you know what I mean. You know, I was supposed to make a movie last year, and I sort of fell apart, That sort of mid range Hollywood forty million dollar film fell apart, just because sometimes you're just not creatively in sync with the money people. You can watch Beasts of No Nation on Netflix.