Don't box him in
'Arthur' director Antoine Fuqua refuses to be confined by genre
LOS ANGELES -- Don't think of Antoine Fuqua as a black director.
Yes, of course, he is both black and a director, first of music videos, then of TV commercials, now of summer blockbuster movies. And he does have stories about the African-American experience that he wants to tell. But he is also moved by the colorblind: mythology and mysticism and morality. The classic internal battles -- good vs. evil, selflessness vs. selfishness -- interest him too.
But Hollywood being Hollywood, where typecasting was created, Fuqua hasn't always found it easy to break out of the urban mold. He made successful rap and R&B videos and got offered more of those, but only those. So he started making commercials, where the only color that mattered was the color of the car or the clothes. Then he made "Training Day," winning his pal Denzel Washington an Oscar for his role as a corrupt and corrupting cop, and came home to a stack of gang-banging, gun-swinging scripts set in the ghetto.
"My whole career I've been fighting against that, being pigeonholed," Fuqua said. "Yeah, I got to meet Prince and Stevie Wonder, but I never got to meet Eric Clapton. I never got to hang out with U2, you know what I mean? Those are all great artists as well.
"Then when I got into the movie business, I got inundated with that as well at the beginning," he continued. "This movie, that movie, it was all black movies, but they didn't have any heart for me. There has got to be more reason for making a movie than the people in it are black like me."
Fuqua says he had plenty of reason for making his latest, "King Arthur," which he describes as a tale that has long entranced him but not one he ever thought he'd be asked to helm. With an all-white, mostly British cast, the period drama is not an obvious fit. But Fuqua, 38, says anyone who knows him understood, especially his wife, the actress Lela Rochon ("Waiting to Exhale").
His version of "King Arthur," after all, is not about the magic sword but about the man, as he puts it. It's not the expected medieval legend but a grittier reworking of the familiar framework. Fuqua's "King Arthur," which opens Wednesday, posits a hero who can be ambivalent, who can be hurt, who has to answer to himself as well as others. A pumped up Clive Owen, from the sleeper hit "Croupier," stars. The teenage Keira Knightley, newly acquired six-pack abs in place, is his bow-and-arrow-toting Guinevere.
"When I read the script, I thought, `Finally, everything I believe in, all the philosophies I believe in, are embodied in this script,' " Fuqua said. "I talk about mysticism and mythology and [mythologist] Joseph Campbell way too much. I talk about this internal battle, the journey of the spirit and the flesh and all that kind of stuff that most people just roll their eyes at. But when you think about `King Arthur,' that's all it is, a representation of defeating your dragons, defeating your fears. . . . It's a question of getting home with your morals intact."
Hugh Dancy, who plays Sir Galahad, says he was familiar with Fuqua's work on "Training Day" before he was cast, but not the lesser-known "Tears of the Sun," starring Bruce Willis, or "The Replacement Killers," his debut film, featuring action star Chow Yun Fat. Still, Dancy says, he understood almost immediately why producer Jerry Bruckheimer chose Fuqua to make a big-budget summer movie set in England.
"What you're trying to do is take a story everyone knows in terms of legend and myth and place it fairly and squarely in the real world -- and not just the real world but a world that is violent, gritty, and dangerous, really a kill-or-be-killed situation," said Dancy, most recently seen as the prince in the fairy tale "Ella Enchanted." "You don't want somebody who's going to gloss it up. You need to achieve the realism and at the same time the sense of heroism and grandeur. That's perfect for Antoine."
Fuqua, a fitness nut, also demanded his own sort of physical perfection on set. He put his British cast through the gym-rat paces. He had them working with weights to the point of exhaustion, the better to wield their swords. He put real bows and arrows in their arms. And then there were the hours and days and weeks on horseback, which had "every one of us in agony," according to Dancy. But Fuqua didn't sit on the sidelines. He gave the skills a go, too. Now he jokes his crew could take on the cast from the "Kill Bill" movies.
"I'm physical, I have to touch it, even as a director. I can't just sit on a camera and say, `Yeah, that looks great,' " Fuqua said. "I'm pretty damn good with that sword now. I'd kick [butt]."
Action movies aside -- and Fuqua's made a few -- he says he also has smaller, more intimate stories to tell, as soon as Hollywood will let him. He'd like to direct a romantic comedy set in Europe, where he says his foreignness heightens his senses. He's also trying to develop a family drama for Rochon, a movie about the chaos of relationships but also the commitment of blood.
Next up is "Tru Blu," starring Washington again, along with Benicio Del Toro. It's the story of the rise and fall of a heroin empire built by smuggling the drug into the country in the caskets of soldiers killed in Vietnam.
That movie, too, embodies many of the moral quandaries that Fuqua says have fascinated him since boyhood. He grew up "screen door hanging off the hinges poor" in one of Pittsburgh's toughest neighborhoods, one of four children of working parents who kept their kids in check despite the dangers around them. Friends died, to be sure, killed in gang crossfire or other accidents. But his memories are mostly of love, of playing ball in the A&P parking lot and coming home to an extended family that expected something from him.
Moviemaking wasn't it, though, even if Fuqua did see every movie that came out and then stay up watching them late at night. Although Carnegie Mellon University, with its vaunted theater program, was in his hometown, he says it never occurred to him to attend. Instead he studied electrical engineering at West Virginia University, playing basketball and thinking he'd get a "job job" afterward, something steady with benefits.
But he also wanted out of Pittsburgh. He wanted to go in real life where the movies had taken him in his imagination. In 1987, on more or less a whim, he moved to New York to direct music videos. He made a name fast. He started making money and moved his parents to safer ground. The father of three -- an 11-year-old son from a previous relationship, a toddler daughter, and a boy barely a month old -- lives with his wife and kids in Beverly Hills, where he swears he will provide an equally solid foundation despite the perks and problems that can come with celebrity and money.
"I found a craft and an art form that I love, but everything that I bring to this business I got from [my extended family]. Whatever it is I got, it's from that place. Any vision I have starts there," Fuqua said. "My childhood memories are actually quite poetic really; I have pictures in my mind of crooked doors and rickety steps, and I slept in the basement, but it was wonderful. I'd like to make a movie about it one day."
Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com. 