Filmmaker Cary Fukunaga is rightfully garnering an intense amount of attention as his HBO series True Detective continues to mesmerize week after week.  In an atypical move for television, Fukunaga directed all eight episodes of True Detective, and the result of his collaboration with writer Nic Pizzolatto is truly stunning.  Fukunaga already has two features under his belt—Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre—and he’s developing a number of others, but in a recent interview he revealed another project that he’s been working on with Edward Norton that would see him tackle the Great War.  He also provided a bit of trivia by noting that Alejandro González Iñárritu was briefly attached to direct True Detective before he came aboard.

Hit the jump for more, including Fukunaga’s brutally honest thoughts on Pompeii and an update on his two-part It adaptation.

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Image via HBO

Fukunaga is currently preparing his next feature, the child soldier film Beasts of No Nation with Idris Elba, but he’s apparently been working on a Civil War film for some time.  Speaking with The Daily Beast in a fascinating interview, Fukunaga revealed that he’s been collaborating with Edward Norton on the project for a few years: 

“Ed Norton is probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. We’re working on a project together. We’ve been working on this adaptation of Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War for almost five years. I want to do it as soon as possible.”

Helprin’s novel takes place both during the Great War and half a century later, in the 1960s, as it follows the young son of a prosperous lawyer who becomes a professor.  No further details are given on the project, but we can now add it to Fukunaga’s potential “to-do” slate.

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Speaking of which, the director, also spoke a bit about his two-film adaptation of the Stephen King novel It:

“It’s going to be a two-part movie, and I don’t think they’ll come out at the same time; they’ll be done separately. I think you have to separate the child and the adult stories in It, so I’m going to tell the kid’s movie first, and the second will be the adult’s movie. Our version will be faithfully but tastefully updated—making sure it’s appropriately scary, but not kitsch.”

Finally, Fukunaga was refreshingly honest when recounting his viewing experience of Paul W.S. Anderson’s recent disaster epic Pompeii:

“I watched an awful movie last night, by the way that I had to turn off. I watched Pompeii. I’d been working on a Pompeii project at Universal for a long time—around the time I was working on the musical for Focus—so I went down to Napoli, researched at Herculaneum and Pompeii. It took me two weeks. In two weeks, I got enough information to tear apart that movie frame-by-frame. Did they ever watch a YouTube video of what a volcano actually looks like? Or a pyroclastic cloud?”

With only two episodes left to go in True Detective, you can bet that Fukunaga’s phone is going to be very busy for the foreseeable future.  For now, though, it’s admirable that he’s sticking to his passion project Beasts of No Nation as his next film.  The low-budget pic begins filming this summer.

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Image via HBO