Antoine Fuqua’s favourite filmmakers: “I became a director just for the love of movies”
There’s no shame in being a journeyman director, especially when it opens the filmmaker in question’s eyes to virtually everything cinema has to offer, with a desire to hop from genre to genre becoming a hallmark of Antoine Fuqua‘s career.
Like many of his generation, he got his start in music videos – including Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ – before making the jump to features in 1998’s The Replacement Killers, which marked the American debut of John Woo’s former muse and action icon Chow Yun-Fat.
His third film saw him direct Denzel Washington to an Academy Award-winning performance in Training Day, the start of a fruitful partnership that’s since seen them re-team for The Equalizer trilogy and The Magnificent Seven, with action thrillers and Westerns only two strings to Fuqua’s bow.
Believe it or not, the highest-grossing hit of his career is 2004’s historical epic King Arthur, while he’s overseen Mark Wahlberg and Gerard Butler gun down goons in Shooter and Olympus Has Fallen respectively, reunited with the former for dismal sci-fi Infinite, helmed Jake Gyllenhaal’s boxing drama Southpaw, dived back into the past with Will Smith’s Emancipation, and taken the reins on the high-profile Michael Jackson biopic, Michael.
While his filmography has leaned heavily into propulsive thrills, big stars, and high concepts, Fuqua was inspired by the classics. Telling the BBC that he “became a director just for the love of movies,” he credited “Kurosawa films and watching Sergio Leone movies” for igniting his dream of stepping behind the camera himself and making it in Hollywood.
Those two stand tall as his biggest influences, with Fuqua admitting he “would have loved being on their set to see how they worked”. As for more modern purveyors of cinematic excellence? He’s friendly with both Michael Mann and Oliver Stone, while “Scorsese would be someone I’d love to hang out with,” as is presumably the case for the majority of directors yet to spend any time in his company.
Despite being one of the most influential and important directors in history, though, Fuqua maintains that Akira Kurosawa remains underrated, at least “in the consciousness of the layman”. For him, while anyone who work in the industry knows full well of his towering impact, he remains unconvinced general audiences would “know what he did, or how he did it.”
The best piece of advice he’s ever been given came from one of his inspirations, too, with four-time Academy Award winner Stone telling Fuqua to “fight like hell for the film”. The Platoon orchestrator knew his way around a behind-the-scenes squabble or three, and even though that’s never been something Fuqua has been associated with, he’s taken those words to heart and lived his life by them nonetheless.
He may not have been showered in acclaim, awards, and admiration to the same degree, but for any filmmaker hoping to develop their craft, using Kurosawa, Leone, Mann, Stone, and Scorsese as touchstones paid huge dividends for Fuqua.
