Speaking to an audience at Tribeca Film Festival ahead of the Netflix release of his new film Beasts of No Nation, director Cary Fukunaga praised the current era of consumer-lead accessibility while also preemptively mourning the possible extinction of the traditional theater experience. The Emmy-winning True Detective director said the power of the consumer is not only proven strong by the ubiquity of certain titles in Netflix queues, but by the effort the average person takes to witness a movie in an actual theater.
"[Beasts of No Nation] was designed to be a film experienced in a group — collectively like this — with strangers in the dark," Fukunaga told the Tribeca audience. "The biggest democratic challenge for an art form [is] that you have to ask the audience to be aware of the fact that they are just as responsible for the death of cinema as the people who make it." Fukunaga's carefully worded remarks point to the noble spirit of the modern auteur, at once a contradiction to the era of binge-watching and the general acceptance of brevity as king and a reluctant embracer of the creative freedom that platforms such as Netflix and HBO can offer.
Sadly, Fukunaga will not be directing the forthcoming second season of True Detective due to possible conflicts with the show's creator Nic Pizzolatto, but will serve as executive producer on the episodes.
