Having built an impressive resume in Hollywood the last few years with the thrilling Sin Nombre and stunning adaptation of Jane Eyre, 36-year-old Cary Fukunaga has suddenly catapulted himself onto the list of young go-to directors with his work on HBO's True Detective, whose eight episodes were all directed by Fukunaga. Disguised as a police procedural starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, its Rubik's Cube story structure penned by creator Nic Pizzolatto alongside Fukunaga's unconventional shooting techniques have quickly made the show an Internet theory-crazed must-watch. Before jumping on a plane to Africa for his next movie, Fukunaga talked to us about the stunning reveal in tonight's penultimate episode (warning: spoilers ahead), why he likes pink underwear, and what's ahead.

I think there is a chance that the audience will see Carcosa.

ESQUIRE.COM: Bringing back Lawnmower Man last night, was that scene pretty much how Nic wrote it?

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CARY FUKUNAGA: Yeah. It think it's always been that way. It's funny because it's one of those scenes that we used for casting so I've seen it so many times by so many different people. But it's always been Gilbough and Papania rolling up to a cemetery asking a guy questions and taking off again. Just in terms of location, though, when I found that cemetery I thought it was pretty amazing so I really wanted to shoot there. And there's actually no main road there, it's a private cemetery for the family that owns that part of the swamp. It's an area that used to be really affluent a couple hundred years ago, because the boats used to arrive there that were trying to go to New Orleans. So it was a big stopping off point. But it's been bypassed now and has sunk into the swamp. And in terms of the panning off at the end of the scene, that's a motif I'd been doing since episode two. When we shot the church it was such an interesting location with that road behind the door that I wanted to see if I could run credits over those things and do one-minute long shots. Eventually we just cut it down because it was a little too long, but you'll notice the end will kind of linger for about 20 to 30 seconds and that's a motif that I kind of put in throughout the show.

ESQ: And the reveal of showing Lawnmower Man's face, talk about the setup for that.

CF: I definitely always wanted to track around, ideally the light would have been 180 degrees on the other side of his face, but in television you're working on a completely different schedule and we weren't even sure we were going to get that scene that day. No one believed we'd get through our day's work and still get to that location and get that scene. We shot that whole thing in about 25 minutes. Everything. All of the shots. So it was kind of crazy. We did two takes of that reveal shot.

ESQ: Have you followed any of the Internet theories on the show?

CF: Not really, no. [Laughs] Friends ask me and I will not tell them so I get a little bit of chatter. Even my reps have forgotten what happens at the end. So I hear a little bit of it but seeing how I know everything it's like listening to fantasy.

ESQ: After episode six we declared pink underwear the new Southern Gothic signifier —

CF: [Laughs] Oh, really?

ESQ: Any story behind the use of pink for both Beth and Maggie?

CF: I picked the underwear for both of them. Maybe I like pink underwear and unconsciously just don't know it. [Laughs] I did not think about it. I got sent a lot of pictures of Lili Simmons [who plays Beth] in various forms of underwear and those were the ones I chose. I thought, especially for the one where she's showing her derriere, it seemed to be the most flattering on her.

ESQ: And pink always seems to pop on screen.

CF: Yeah. Well, flesh tone doesn't look as good, black can seem too indicative, red seems a cliché, and teal comes off not nice on people's skin. So you end up on pink. Pink is very flattering.

ESQ: Pizzolatto's mention of The King in Yellow really sparked the online frenzy about the show. He's voiced his love for the book, you own the book, too. How much did it influence you guys on set?

CF: I think for Nic, he definitely enjoys those references. For us we'll take the signifiers in terms of content and lace them throughout. So, yes, it definitely did. Black stars. Different forms of yellow are definitely peppered throughout the show.

ESQ: How strategic are the Easter eggs? At the end of episode seven, Lawnmower Man is mowing in a circle, a "flat circle" —

CF: Oh, yeah, I wasn't sure if anyone was going to notice that. That wasn't scripted. Literally I asked the guy who takes care of that cemetery not to mow the lawn for a while so we could actually have [Lawnmower Man] mowing. And then when we got there it just occurred to me that if we had a crane shot it would be the perfect place to shoot a spiral. It kind of took a little bit to explain to the special effects guy what I wanted. He thought I was just making a race track. I was like, "No, no, as you come around come on the inside of your line, you're making a spiral." It's not a perfect flat circle. [Laughs]

ESQ: So some were planned and some were spontaneous?

CF: Yes. Exactly. Some of them were scripted and some of them are completely accidental and some of them were just spontaneous. It comes down to little things. Like tattoos that people had, we chose them on the day. The black stars on the glass at the end of episode five, the trees and everything, that was really planned. That was something I worked out with the art department, with a lens, knowing focal distances and how far away I needed to be, because we had to build that wall around the window and put it in the room so the camera could go through it. So some things are absolutely planned.

ESQ: Will any of the mythology from this season spill into next season?

CF: It wouldn't surprise me. I don't know what the next season is going to be yet. It wouldn't surprise me knowing Nic's interest and having continuity. And seeing it's going to be another murder story, that kind of cosmic horror that [The King in Yellow author Robert] Chambers writes about, it wouldn't surprise me if that continues.

ESQ: But the main things related to this year's plot will end in the finale?

CF: Um, I can't even answer that because I really don't know. I wouldn't want to speculate and have it be wrong.

ESQ: Everyone is going crazy about McConaughey's performance, but you guys originally wanted him for the Martin Hart character. And this was before the incredible streak he's been on with Killer Joe, Magic Mike, Dallas Buyers Club. Did you guys foresee that he would run with this character or was it a bit of a gamble?

CF: I don't think you'd ever gamble on something this big. I think we all agreed he had the chops and the question was how is he going to interpret it? How is he going to embody it? And even through rehearsals we didn't know because we don't really do rehearsals. I don't run scenes, we just talk about them. It wasn't until a month in as we started to cut together scenes and look at them that we started to understand where McConaughey was going with it. But he had an entire arc planned. It wasn't haphazard, show up on the day and figure out who I am. He knew point-to-point-to-point where he wanted to be. He was managing the various parts of his character at different points in the timeline in terms of how much he was containing himself, how much he was letting himself go.

ESQ: A lot of people comment about his 2012 hair, but I've been taken by his walk. Did you ask him what's up with the Cohle walk?

CF: [Laughs] That's just something he came up with. We didn't talk about it much. I mean, the psychology of where he took Cohle's mannerisms and then how he physically embodied them is all him. That's not scripted, that's Matthew McConaughey making decisions about the way he smokes, the way he walks, the way he drives, the way he does everything. There's a lot of stuff where he doesn't even look. Things are happening off his eyeline as if he is completely capable of doing everything without looking because his senses are so keen.

ESQ: Did you have to sell anyone on the amount of Cohle monologues you wanted to do?

CF: Um. [Laughs] No, no. We did not.

ESQ: How about the six-minute tracking shot?

CF: There was a moment in pre-production where they questioned why I wanted to do it because it was getting expensive to plan it, but once I explained it everyone was behind it. Early on, like a year before we even started, I talked to Nic about it. As I was kind of wrapping my head around the idea of television speed, I said, "We have to maintain a craft in every episode and not just fall into a reactionary style of shooting." In TV you have no time and sort of just carpet bomb the scene with as many angles as possible as quickly as possible and find it in the edit. I said, "We have to have more of an artistry to it," and I basically asked him to make sure to back me up when we get to those points where we had to sort of protect that side of it. I thought every episode should have something special, and every episode does, more or less. Episode four's one shot was something I planned probably from the moment I read that scene. I just thought it should be a "oner."

ESQ: How many times did you shoot it?

CF: I think we did 13 takes in which at least six to eight were boarded. I can't remember the exact number, but we had about seven complete takes.

ESQ: The shot of Reggie Ledoux at the end of episode three still haunts me. Talk about setting up that reveal.

CF: You always have Cohle in 2012 talking about it so that was the framing mechanism. So the question was just finding the right location to build the meth shack and then finding the right angle to sort of unveil him. We had a location for a long time, almost when we were up to shooting, in the Northshore of Louisiana, but it was getting too close to flooding season and there was a chance that the set we were building would basically go away with any big rainstorm. So we had to scramble to find a new location and we found this property. It was a much more open space and I had always been looking for a place that had a berm, and this had an old levee, so it allowed you a little more of a perch to view things from. It's surprisingly hard to find a berm in Louisiana. It's about as flat as you can get.

ESQ: Is there a scene that stands out for you from the show?

CF: There's not one. There are scenes that after we shot we were like, "That was a fun scene to shoot," or the guys were really on fire in that scene. The scenes I enjoyed a lot between McConaughey and Harrelson, there were two: One is when they are in the locker room and Cohle makes a comment about Hart's wife's pussy, and the other one is the two of them after the hospital in episode four, having drinks at the bar and Hart is trying to have a heart-to-heart with Cohle and Cohle doesn't want to. He calls him "the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch." After shooting those two, you just felt like those are great little nuggets. They didn't take long and weren't hard to execute, they were just nice.

ESQ: It seems Pizzolatto was on the set a lot. How was that for you, coming from the feature world?

CF: For the most part it was great to have an ally to talk about characters and go through questions about certain pieces of dialogue that didn't quite make sense. He could clarify it. And there were times when Matthew would come and say, "I don't need to say these first three lines," and we'd find a new way into the scene and Nic would be there to rewrite the opening to the scene. It was interesting. I had never done something that had so many eyes, but you learn to adapt.

ESQ: You guys had this bible for the show. How much did you veer from it as production went on?

CF: The bible changed subtly as the scripts took form. Even as we edited there was some mixing and matching for the last four episodes, where some scenes moved from one episode to another, just to adapt to what became the show. Because when you write something, you shoot something, you edit something, there are three different stages. It works the same for film as it does for television. So things are going to change there, just in the writing and development process. HBO had notes about certain points to elevate tension, so the usual things that happen when the pieces are starting to form and take shape.

ESQ: Is this experience going to change you as a filmmaker?

CF: Maybe. I don't know. I guess I'll have to see for the next one. Beasts of No Nation will be the first film I've shot since then. I've literally finished True Detective two weeks ago and I'm already full force into the next film so I haven't really had a moment to take stock and see how I've changed as a filmmaker. But once I'm on set shooting and editing again, I think I'll definitely be able to compare and contrast.

ESQ: Any teaser you can give to us about the last episode?

CF: [Laughs] Hmm, what can I say? [Long pause] I think there is a chance that the audience will see Carcosa.

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