Cary Fukunaga Talks to GQ About His First Project in Four Years

"I realized I have a tendency to make things harder than they need to be," director Cary Fukunaga admits to Zach Baron. "Having fun with genre and not worrying too much about production value went out the door the moment I started conceiving ideas." Baron visits Fukunaga to learn about the story of making Maniac for Netflix, for the September issue of GQ.

Maniac is Fukanaga's first project in nearly four years. Despite the wild success of True Detective, Jane Eyre, and Beasts of No Nation, Fukanaga has known only delayed productions, disagreements with studios and projects that never came to be: "Time vaporized. Just gone. I was in the prime of the my directing life!" he laments. He recounts his decision to leave It, which he wrote, two weeks before shooting began. "I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn't control me," Fukunaga says about disagreements with studio execs. He denies that he's difficult to work with: "It was just more a perception. They thought they couldn't control me. I would have been a total collaborator."

Fukunaga's series, Maniac, debuts on Netflix in September, starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill as two patients in a pharmaceutical drug trial. It's a mindtrip for audiences, as the two broken characters try to connect with each other, even when they're hallucinating. Fukunaga took drastic measures to ensure the series explored hallucinations accurately. "I was saying: 'this wasn't good enough,'" he tells Baron about the early versions of the script. "The whole joy in this is to be able to play with different worlds and we're not doing that." He decided to throw away half the scripts and start over, just three months before production was scheduled to begin."Everyone was concerned. It made it hard to budget; it made it hard to schedule...But it was the right move."

Maniac premieres on Netflix on September 21.

The full feature with photos by Thomas Whiteside can be found HERE.

The September issue of GQ is on stands now.

Photo credit is Thomas Whiteside exclusively for GQ.

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