What the fuqua

The last time Moviehouse caught up with Antoine Fuqua, the hipper-than-thou African-American director of Training Day and Tears Of The Sun, he was still reeling from the news that his R-rated cut of King Arthur had been reworked into a family film by Disney. Suffice to say, I’ve seen happier men ripping up slips outside the bookies.

Happily, Mr. Fuqua seems to have recovered. He laughs and covers his face with mock embarrassment when I remind him of the, erm, unpleasantness.
“You know how it is with studios,” he says. “They can’t get the director out of there fast enough.”
Poor Antoine. The suits really have been giving him a hard time of late. Creative differences caused him to walk away from American Gangster, a drugs epic based on the true story of a dealer who smuggled heroin in the caskets of Vietnam War soldiers. The project has since fallen into the hands of Sir Ridley Scott and his resident muse Russell Crowe.
This did, however, free up Antoine to dabble with documentaries. The filmmaker’s fine account of the history of the blues – Lightning In A Bottle – was produced by leading culture vulture Martin Scorsese.
“Martin kept saying to me ‘You know, I’m really glad you’re not making American Gangster anymore,’” laughs Mr. Fuqua. “Well, that made one of us.”
A second feature doc, Bastards Of The Party, provided a fascinating look at the history of gang-bangers.
“I was sitting with Bones, a blood friend one night,” recalls the director. “And it was one of those really simple questions that come up. How did all this shit get started anyway? And I said to him, okay, why don’t you go find out. It became a 10-year journey. He went out and talked to all these original gangsters and ex-panthers and all these other cats. And then we found these ex-FBI guys who were willing to go on camera and admit what Hoover had them do to divide the black community. And then you start looking at the crack epidemic and the role they played there. They don’t want us to know or think about this stuff. But it’s consistently happening.”
Fuqua, as he’ll tell you, is no stranger to urban violence. As a teenager, he was shot in his right side while running down an alley. The bullet narrowly missed his right lung. He took refuge in movies and after a stint in West Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, he moved to New York and worked his way up from production assistant to superstar commercials director.
When he made his ridiculously stylish feature debut with The Replacement Killers, it was assumed he had to be a budding French auteur.
“I’d take a meeting,” he recalls. “And if the guys in suits got over the shock of seeing a big black guy, they automatically start speaking French at me.”
Antoine’s latest venture is Shooter, a political conspiracy theory thriller with clear echoes of the post-classical paranoia found in The Conversation and The Parallax View. Pitched somewhere between Die Hard and Fahrenheit 9/11, the film stars Mark Wahlberg as a former sniper who is framed by the US government and references certain missing weapons of mass destruction and the 9/11 commission report.
“I love movies like Three Days Of The Condor so I’m always watching them anyway,” he says. “So when this came up I went back to those titles. They remind you of why you wanted to make movies. If you’re aware of what’s going on in the world, it doesn’t compute. There are children starving but we’ve got $20 billion to go to war? I mean this is a movie and it’s got cool stuff with guns. But it’s great that it’s the kind of film that might make you think about Haliburton and all those cats. We all need to do something.”
Then he laughs.
“We can’t just leave everything to Bono.”
Shooter is released April 6.