Cary Fukunaga isn't entirely sure if he has a reputation for being difficult. But it's something he's heard from time to time. He heard it, obliquely, in the wake of shooting HBO's True Detective—a show that became a phenomenon following the fourth episode, which included a virtuosic, six-minute-long, unbroken tracking shot of Matthew McConaughey stalking his way through a robbery that turns into a bloodbath. Some people, such as the show's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, thought Fukunaga was being willfully idiosyncratic just for insisting on a shot like that. "Nic wanted to cut it up in post-production," Fukunaga says over lunch on a humid summer afternoon in New York, where he lives and where he's currently finishing Maniac, a surrealist Netflix series starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone as two patients in a pharmaceutical drug trial. "He did not like that I was pushing for that one at all." But the show had been a lot of talking, and a lot of philosophizing, before that. "I mean, there's nothing really that inventive about" True Detective, Fukunaga says. "It's just another crime drama." Fukunaga wasn't trying to showboat. He just thought: "Let's do something fun."

And then there was It, the 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, which Fukunaga wrote and was prepared to direct. He ultimately decided to leave the project two weeks before it was due to start shooting. For reasons that still aren't entirely clear to him, the studio started treating Fukunaga like he might go rogue. "I think it was fear on their part, that they couldn't control me."

And...were they right?

"No, they thought they couldn't control me. I would have been a total collaborator. That was the kind of ridiculous part. It was just more a perception. I have never seen a note and been like, Fuck you guys. No way. It's always been a conversation."

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He rolls his eyes. "I don't think I've ever been able to make something uncompromising. Like, someone commented on Beasts”—Beasts of No Nation, the film about child soldiers that he adapted in 2015 from the novel of the same name—“Oh, how did it feel to make a movie that's uncompromising? Like, uncompromising? I had to rewrite my entire third act ’cause we didn't have the money to finish the film. We compromise all over the place."

The irony, to Fukunaga's mind, was that he'd worked hard to apprentice himself. To be humble about what he did and didn't know. In 2009, for instance, he signed on to direct a new adaptation of Jane Eyre. At the time, he was 32 and coming off his first film, a border thriller called Sin Nombre, which had won a directing prize at Sundance. Before that he'd been a professional snowboarder, and then a production assistant in Los Angeles, working poolside while Destiny's Child shot their video for "Survivor," and stone outcrop–side while Britney Spears shot "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman." Fukunaga is a romantic, and Jane Eyre appealed to that part of him; it was also a relatively conventional studio film, with movie stars (Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska), fancy costumes, and well-known source material. Fukunaga wanted to prove that he could handle—even excel at—a movie like that. "It was a pretty straightforward film. There was nothing experimental about it. But for me, it was an exercise."

The exercise worked. Fukunaga's Jane Eyre was taut, glossy, a bit haunted—a success, and a calling card, and almost immediately, people called. His next project was True Detective, which made him a household name, in households that pay attention to directors. But Fukunaga only experienced the acclaim secondhand: He was already gone, in Ghana, making Beasts of No Nation. That movie nearly killed him—he was stricken with malaria while preparing to shoot—but after he finished it, Netflix bought the film for $12 million. As Fukunaga looked around for his next project, he was doing so as one of the most sought-after directors in all of Hollywood.

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That was nearly four years ago.