Cary Fukunaga was ‘True Detective’s special sauce
MARCH 19TH, 2016 — POST 075
The Hollywood Reporter yesterday reported on some cast developments with what should be Cary Fukunaga’s next TV project. An adaptation of the 2014 Norwegian series of the same name, Maniac now has Emma Stone and Jonah Hill attached. With these guys in lead roles and Fukunaga set to direct all episodes of what is being reported as a two season deal, the darkly comedic Maniac ought to be hotly anticipated once a network decides to give it a home. If nothing else, even if Fukunaga is the poster boy of single-director TV production after Season 1 of True Detective, Maniac ought to expose Fukunaga’s comedic chops, should he have any. However, if a comparison between the first and second seasons of True Detective is anything to go on, I’m confident he’ll be able to own any script that’s put in front of him.
Movies and television have different heroes. For over a hundred years, the director is the central hero in the business of movies. With this age of television we’re currently witness to, the wider public generally has come to understand the notion of a showrunner and the importance of the writers’ room. In TV, the writer is the hero. Screenwriters like Charlie Kaufman and Aaron Sorkin have been notorious counter examples to the side of this line of thinking that applies to movies. What the almost simultaneity of release that Beasts of No Nation and Season 2 of True Detective showed was that Cary Fukunaga might be the central counter example to the theory of writer-led television production.
After the first season of True Detective, showrunner and head writer Nic Pizzolatto was a hot commodity. He was lauded for wrangling characteristically verbose and pseudo-philosophical dialogue into a tightly woven and more tightly executed expansive crime drama. The elegance of Pizzolatto’s scripts proved perfectly fertile for Matthew McConaughey to cement The McConaissance as the fresh-faced-then-heavily-weathered Detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle. But there was one name that appeared in the opening credits each week that to often I recall being spoken of as “the same director”. Each of True Detective’s first eight episodes were directed by Cary Fukunaga as well as being shot, as is uncommon in TV but expected in film, out of order. When Fukunaga didn’t return for the second season, and the week-to-week response soured, fingers started to point in the hope of finding the answer to: What went wrong?
Vince Vaughn was an easy target. A comedic actor trying to act tough and serious and deep and all McConaughey-ey. Who’s gonna buy that? Pizzolatto caught some criticism too which made claims tantamount to him falling in love a little too much with is own navel-gazing style. President of programming at HBO Michael Lombardo even stepped in to take some blame for rushing Pizzolatto to deliver on the second season. Lombardo feared he had upset the “soulful writer” that Pizzolatto was and the pace he set robbed Pizzolatto of an opportunity to truly “find his muse” as he was able to for Season 1. Either Lombardo is an old-world romanticist about writing or he forgot all about Fukunaga. If you look back now on Season 1 of True Detective with the second season in the rear-view mirror, Fukunaga’s distinct spell is made visible. The same kind of dialogue that clunked out of Vaughn’s head slinks from between McConaughey’s lips. The same kind utterly confused madness that was the story for season two seems a cosmotic construction of brilliance in season one. On paper, they’re not that different.
Fukunaga left the set of True Detective for Ghana to shoot Beasts of No Nation. Following a young boy who gets taken in as a child soldier in West Africa, Fukunaga brings the same kineticism and deliberate ominous restraint as he did to True Detective. In the still, quietist moments of Beasts of No Nation, as with True Detective, the vignetting of the lens is more villainous than visual. With Pizzolatto’s scripts left back in the US, there’s no denying who’s bringing the heat here. If that same heat so obviously kept the pot simmering on True Detective, is Pizzolatto the real MVP?
Maniac will certainly shed more light on this in the coming years, provided its sold (which seems unquestionable at this point). Furthermore, what becomes of a third season of True Detective, at one point the surest property in television, is less definite. What Pizzolatto will do until the close of his contract with HBO is not public knowledge. But one this is for sure.
Of the two, Fukunaga’s the one to watch.
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