Cary Fukunaga‘s upcoming movie Beasts of No Nation will be released on Netflix, but Fukunaga told a Tribeca Film Festival audience that he hoped people would still see it in and other movies like it in theaters.
The writer-director said he is excited that the Netflix release will allow more people to see the difficult, dramatic film than if the movie was given a traditional platform release.
The difficult part of defining yourself as a filmmaker is the concept of releasing a film on a digital platform at the same time its released in cinema really strikes the fear of God in your heart that people are actually still going to go to the cinema to watch the film when if they spend $6 a month they could watch it for free on their laptops,” he said. ”
Beasts of No Nation was designed to be a film experienced in a group, collectively like this, with strangers in the dark and see this story…Netflix’s big thing is consumer choice. So as the audiences start to make that choice and continue to make the choice to only watch online, the cinema experience will only be reserved for comic-book movies. That’s the biggest democratic challenge for an art form that you have to ask the audience to be aware of the fact that they are just as responsible for the death of cinema as the people who make it.”
Fukunaga offered more insight into the process of casting and filming Beasts, revealing that the main boy they cast in the film, 14-year-old Abraham Attah, was essentially a street vendor before. Attah was one of several local kids that they recruited as they cast the film, gathering kids they thought had charisma in the basement of the hotel the crew was staying in to try out scenes that were close to the script.
Fukunaga marveled at how Attah, who also had little education experience before filming and is now getting up to speed at a boarding school in Ghana, went from knowing nothing about acting to in a couple of months being able to do an intense scene with several other kids in which Fukunaga didn’t have to offer any direction.
Fukunaga won an Emmy for his work directing the first season of HBO’s True Detective, but he isn’t helming any of the episodes in season two following rumors that he clashed with creator Nic Pizzolatto. He talked about the “little bit insane” process of starting to film a TV show without knowing what the last three episodes will be.
“It’s actually frightening because you’re starting shooting and you haven’t had the chance to plan anything yet for the end of the series. And so we basically planned in pre-production for True Detective… the first five episodes, really. But 6, 7 and 8 had to be planned while we were shooting; there was no hiatus,” he said. ” This is on top of a 12- to 14-hour day. At night, I’d go meet with the editors, try to get the first couple episodes locked up. Saturdays, more scouting. It just meant you did what you would have done normally in 8 weeks on the tops and ends and bottoms of days.”
