Call to arms
! SPOILER WARNING
Idris Elba as Commandant, a charismatic African warlord, in
2015’s
Beasts Of No Nation.
HAS ANYONE HAD as eclectic a career as Cary Joji Fukunaga? The filmmaker burst onto the scene with Mexican thriller Sin Nombre, dabbled in English melodrama with Jane Eyre, helmed watercooler TV hits such as True Detective and Maniac, and will (hopefully) soon be shaking and stirring with 007 in No Time To Die. But his most acclaimed work remains 2015’s Beasts Of No Nation, based on the book by Uzodinma Iweala.
Set in a never-named West African country (heavily inspired by the real-life civil war in Sierra Leone), it’s a harrowing, sweeping war film about child soldiers, hinged around a masterful performance by Idris Elba as the menacingly charismatic rebel leader Commandant. Released as the first-ever Netflix Original, the film now earns a coveted place in the Criterion Collection, a feat Fukunaga describes as “a dream come true” — but as he explains here, it took years of research, a tumultuous shoot in Ghana, and a minor bout of malaria to get there.
Congratulations on the Criterion release. This must be the final stage of a very long passion project for you…
It first started when I was still an undergrad, working on my thesis. I saw a professor whose office had all these news snippets on his door outside about child soldiers and Rwanda and Uganda. The concept had never really occurred to me at that time. And then, when I graduated, I applied to NYU for film school with this short story about a village being overrun in Sierra Leone. I was reading Sebastian Junger books, and getting deeper into research about what that war was like in Sierra Leone, and ended up going to Sierra Leone in 2000 to do research while working on a documentary. So the subject was something that I was definitely passionate about.