Quotes from Cary Fukunaga

I'm definitely sensitive to the idea of exploitation. You don't want to glamorize certain things.

When you have a script, and you're discussing what it can be, and who going to play what role, that's a kind of like a fantasy football game. You can imagine these different dream teams interpreting these characters that only exist in your head.

I was a big history buff as a teenager.

I like characters that make choices and try to drive their own fate.

I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.

My ideas tend to be either really big in terms of like, the logistics, or really small.

You work with the communities to make films. And you just don't go in and take over their territory.

The problem with being a writer/director: unless you're really disciplined, you start adding projects, and you have to make time to make them. Because you have to write them... no one else is writing them for me.

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

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.

I don't believe happiness comes out of material gain, for sure.

It's rare that you can promote a love story and feel fear in a film.

I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing.

I didn't grow up watching detective shows. I've never even seen an episode of 'CSI.'

It's so easy for shows to be gritty and handheld and shaky and really tight in people's faces.

Collaborations aren't easy, but you definitely get something highly different than had you done it on your own. That's part of the experience.

I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.

Increasingly, there's much better material on television, but there's not always the time and money to make it, so you've got to make sure you make it in the right place. It also depends on time commitment; a lot of directors will make a pilot, but a series is just a whole other level of involvement.

I just have a hard time displaying things.

Literally, I don't have a television. So I don't really know what's happening pop-culturally. I read the 'New York Times.' And there's one worldwide cabin blog that I look at.

I was imagining films in my head and trying to gather friends together to make movies since I was a kid. I tried to do comedy skits and a horror film.

An eight-hour movie is definitely not a two-hour movie. An eight-hour movie is really like five independent films, if you think about it, because each is usually an hour and a half. In some ways, it is like making a movie. It's just a lot more information.

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.

To do action without cuts is infinitely more exciting.