A director whose command of a camera in motion is beyond most of his contemporaries, and whose eight hours of True Detective remain the clearest case for him. The films around it are ambitious, various and harder to pin down.
Fi1m perspective
The fourth episode of True Detective (2014) ends with a raid on a housing estate at night, filmed in one unbroken take of several minutes. Nobody cuts, nobody loses the geography, and by the time it is over you know exactly where everyone is and how badly it has gone. We watched it holding our breath, and we still think it is the best piece of direction the series has produced. It is also the thing Cary Joji Fukunaga does that nobody else in television quite does: he plans a shot for a long time and then lets it run.
He came up through short films at NYU, among them Victoria para Chino (2004), and his first feature, Sin Nombre (2009), which he also wrote, was a story of migration and gangs that arrived at Sundance and set the tone for what followed. Jane Eyre (2011) was a period adaptation and a first sign that he would not stay in one kind of film. Then came all eight episodes of True Detective, written by Nic Pizzolatto, with Adam Arkapaw shooting Louisiana wide and flat under a grey-yellow sky. Directing an entire season yourself is rare, and it is why that season holds together in a way the later ones do not.
Beasts of No Nation (2015) he wrote, directed and photographed himself, shooting in Ghana with children and non-professional actors in a story about child soldiers. He left It the same year over creative differences. Since then the work has swung between the personal and the industrial: the series Maniac (2018), No Time to Die (2021), which he co-wrote and which made him the first American to direct an official Eon Bond film, and episodes of Masters of the Air (2024).
What he does well is put you among people who have no guide and no translator, and keep you there. His outsiders are not explained to us; we find our own way, as they do. What he does less well is stay the course. He has a reputation for exacting standards, and it has cost him at least one film. It also means that for a director admired this widely, the finished record is thinner than you would expect, and the surest thing on it is still a piece of television he made a decade ago.
He has said that after True Detective he thought nothing could be as hard as that, and that Beasts of No Nation eclipsed it. That is the pattern. He chooses the shoot that will hurt, and the results are best when he is allowed to finish. Whatever he makes next, watch for the moment he stops cutting.
Biography
Cary Joji Fukunaga is an American director, screenwriter and cinematographer. Born on 10 July 1977 in Oakland, California, he studied history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and film at New York University.
He directed the feature films Sin Nombre (2009), which he also wrote, Jane Eyre (2011), Beasts of No Nation (2015) and the James Bond film No Time to Die (2021). He directed all eight episodes of the first season of the HBO series True Detective (2014) and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series. He has also directed the Netflix limited series Maniac (2018) and episodes of the Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air (2024).
