Cary Fukunaga Quotes

There's nothing better than finishing something and looking at it. Whether it be a script or a movie, it's this complete little thing that now exists and is hopefully immortal.

You only have so much time in life so everything you do needs to mean something to you.

It's an important part of being a member of society to know what's happening in the world and to know where you fall in it and what you can do about it.

I think it's a fascinating thing to see how lonely people are in this world and what they're looking for. It's a universal concept. So, it's something that interests me and I'll probably revisit it if I get the chance to do the child soldier film because I think it's one of the most important scripts I've written. It's just too dark to do as a film right now. I need to do something a bit different.

Even on my films, I always collaborate with the actors. That's a given. I think you need that. You need the actors to feel as much ownership of the performance and the direction of the story as you do, to get the most out of everyone's potential.

You're always against the clock. But really just fighting for quality.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.

I'm the kind of person where you're never done, you just keep perfecting and perfecting and perfecting, or trying to fix things that drive you crazy. Often times when you watch a film, "if I could just get through this minute, I'll be fine." So I think I'm just hard on myself.

If you think of most murders as being between people who know each other, it's very easy to figure out who the killer is. But when you have a murder that appears random, where the person is not someone that's within the known radius of the victim, then it's much, much more difficult to solve.

My mind is in so many different places while we're shooting. Part of it is watching the performance, part of it is watching the camera, and part of it is thinking about the stuff that we have to get that day. It's always a pleasure watching, but you also take it for granted, when you're on the actual grind, making the show.

The apartments are made for eels.

I don't really put trophies out. I don't keep trophies around my apartment.

If you really want to tell someone you love them, you don't just go and blurt it out. There's a dance. And your movie does that.

If you have something really important you want to say, you have to read your audience, I guess.

A period romance film with elements of horror. That was successful, because I feel like Coppola's DRACULA was one or the other. You know? It was never scary it was never a film he got invested in the romance of the characters. He understood it, but he never got invested. So it as a challenge for me to see if I could do that, I still don't know how audiences will sort of react to that.

I've been wanting to make a movie about the war in Sierra Leone, specifically, for more than 15 years.

When you know you have a certain amount of work to finish, you just don't allow yourself to get sick again.

I'm pretty hard to impress, and I'm pretty exacting, in terms of what I want from my props department and art department. We spend many, many hours going over visual research and finding the right artists to create the material.

Getting back in the directors chair - there's a sense of like doing something every year. It's not like riding a bike, you're always learning new things, you're gonna face new challenges and when you face new challenges you'll have an answer for them.

I do want to direct a movie from horseback one day.

Collaboration sometimes causes conflict, and sometimes it's easy, but the bringing together of great minds only adds.

You have to tease enough misinformation and lack of information to hopefully make people want more.

There are a lot of movies I would want to be a fly on the wall for. I would have loved to see the making of Jaws [1975], with all the fears and anxieties it was going to be a complete failure, and then to have it turn into the first blockbuster.

In a city like New York, especially for young professionals who aren't in a family situation, most people don't cook for themselves. This is the only city I've ever lived in where I eat out every night.

It takes the wool from your eyes about how the world works, to show you that nothing's necessarily fair, and that you might have a hard life.