“Sin Nombre” director Cary Fukunaga recently took to Vanity Fair to discuss his future in cinema including his next project, potentially his time travel film, as well as his gestating fantasy, love story musical.
While the director is set to tackle an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender later this month, Fukunaga already has a number of projects in the works, even revealing immediate plans on discussing said projects with studios.
“I do have some ideas for my next film, which I’m pitching to Universal Studios soon, that are just as different. And I was writing a musical for Focus before this… but it’s presumptuous to think that I could get a musical done in a year.”
We previously reported that Fukunaga was likely pitching his time travel film to Universal described as a “very human character piece that will transcend the genre” with “an accessible story that people can feel emotionally.” A time-travel pic and a musical after “Jane Erye” would definitely continue the helmer’s trend of genre-jumping.
“I wouldn’t want to be genre-specific,” Fukunaga adds. “I like the idea of like trying new things, otherwise it’s not that interesting. So, I guess that explains the jump from Mexico to Victorian England.”
While noting that he’s not really a fan of musicals, Fukunaga does note his love for music in general and “musical music” as inspiration for his own developing musical which tentatively has Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy) and Beirut’s Zach Gordon attached.
“It’s about a boy and a girl who are in love with each other,” Fukunaga reveals. “And they both live in parallel dimensions. Her world is like our world and his world is like our world, but they don’t coincide, and the way they’re able to see and hear each other is via singing. But they can’t touch each other, so that’s like the worst thing.”
“So it’s a nod to Pyramus and Thisbe. Do you know the story? It’s a Babylonian tale about the most beautiful boy in town and the most beautiful girl in town, who are neighbors but their parents hate each other and they can’t see each other. But there’s a hole in the wall through which they could talk to each other but they couldn’t touch each other… This is basically — Shakespeare basically got ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from this tale.”
Fukunaga’s accomplished debut effort “Sin Nombre” already explored elements of a tragic love tale with flourish so to see him explore a similar story as a musical backed by indie-rockers Pallett and Condon is something we’re greatly anticipating — hopefully he can find the time finish the script. In the mean time, his adaptation of “Jane Eyre” with Wasikowska, Fassbender, Sally Hawkins, Jamie Bell, Judi Dench and Imogen Poots should see a release by year’s end with his time-travel pic hopefully next in 2011?
Either way, Fukunaga hopes to come out with films at a mouth-wateringly speedy rate. The director has already abandoned plans to write all his films on account of “the amount of movies [he] wants to make in the finite time” he has.
