The movie garnered a massive amount of critical acclaim when it screened at Venice global Film Festival and Toronto Internation Film Festival earlier this year. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. When you do your application, you’re supposed to say, if you make a feature film, what will it be about. It debuted on the streaming service Friday at the same day it opens in Landmark Theatres in 31 movie houses across 27 markets, including Los Angeles and New York.
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I walked out of a morning screening of “Beasts of No Nation” last week feeling like I was going to be sick. It’s the kind of scene that made me question Fukunaga’s judgment – I think you have to question the judgment of something that explicit – before deciding that both his aims and his methods are moral. They said they wanted to do it, and they waited patiently. “I’m pretty fortunate that I can move between things pretty freely”, he says. “I didn’t want to do that”. “But like I said, from my perspective, everyone has a nose and everyone has an opinion”. That never went away, and my connection to the story never went away.
Elba (43) is perhaps more circumspect about the white-hot Oscar buzz surrounding his portrayal as a complex, conflicted Commandant of an unnamed African country in Beasts Of No Nation.
The guy has gravitas. The first part of the film turns into a horrific orgy of murder, then Agu cuts through the chaos and tries to reconcile himself with a God who must understand what’s being allowed to happen. They finished it, nearly nine years after Fukunaga read the book, and showed it to a couple ofstudios-indcluding Focus, which still had right of first refusal-before going to Netflix. By no means is this a Kony story.
“He brought humanity in a way that was unexpected for that role”, the director said. He’s somehow able to communicate through his acting. In terms of getting him on board, that was a coup. Until this movie, he had never been to Ghana. It legitimized what we were trying to do.
You were the DP, director, screenwriter, and producer on this. Has it gotten easier?
I think I realized how psychologically and physically hard the film would be. We tried using infrared on “True Detective” as well for Rust Cohle’s hallucinogenic sequences, and we couldn’t find infrared stock anywhere. I’ll probably get a sense of the seat count for per-screen average for theatrical, but I’m not sure if I’ll actually know who’s tuning in to download the film. We put it on the radio, on TV, everything.
Likewise, no matter how out there Beasts gets, whether Agu’s being asked to chop people up, snort “brown-brown” (a peculiarly African mix of cocaine and gunpowder) or participate in primitive initiation rituals, it doesn’t feel sensational. Iweala’s idea was to make his protagonist-narrator a boy, Agu (Abraham Attah onscreen), who sees his father, brother, and friends executed by government troops on the freaky pretense that these blameless civilians are rebel combatants. So you think they should vertically integrate the whole entertainment experience? (Photo by Vera Anderson/WireImage) NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 25: Abraham Attah and Idris Elba at the “Beasts Of No Nations” Press Conference at the Conrad New York on September 25, 2015 in New York City. He’s a street vendor.
“True Detective” was released as an eight-part HBO series and not an epic movie in one or two parts – but taken as separate episodes or a complete arc.
It is, in fact, the latest from Netflix, the streaming giant with over 69 million subscribers and 2014 revenue of $5.5 billion (U.S.).
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Agu is removed from the atrocities of war but he knows he can’t escape it. The people helping Agu want him to talk about what he’s experienced, what he did, what he saw, what was done to him.
