Cary Fukunaga is mulling how audiences will receive Beasts of No Nation, which stars Idris Elba as a warlord who recruits an army of child soldiers in an unspecified African country.
“I certainly don’t want this film to be considered an issue film,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter before the film’s screening at Toronto Film Festival, “but if for just one two-hour moment of their life, they feel this connection with this kid who is otherwise just a sort of bit of concrete detail in a news article, but is someone real, flesh and blood, someone who sticks with them in their memory, then I’ve sort of succeeded in showing how interconnected and small the world really is, and how universal our desires are in life.”
He added that he hopes the first-ever feature for Netflix “contextualizes [the crisis] and makes it understandable so it’s not just some far-off thing, but we get a sense that these are issues that actually do affect us and aren’t just something on the other side of the planet that we don’t have to worry about.”
The helmer also shared his thoughts on whether Elba could play James Bond.
“I believe that guy can pretty much do anything. For lack of better words, James Bond is this quintessential panty-dropper, and so is Idris,” he said. “They’re both pretty charismatic, so why not?”
Watch THR’s chat with Fukunaga right now.
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