WASHINGTON -- To herald the release of his first feature film, Cary Joji Fukunaga is being put up at a swank downtown hotel. A small coterie of publicists hovers in the background, delivering beverages and ferrying the moviemaker from one interview to the next.
At the Sundance Film Festival, his movie, "Sin Nombre," won top awards for directing and cinematography.
Pretty soon, he says, he should even be able to live in an apartment without roommates.
Such are the dichotomies of life for a 32-year-old who is just out of the gate and already being deemed a "big new talent," by Variety and other industry watchers.
Fukunaga's film about the efforts of immigrants to traverse Mexico and cross the border into the United States began as a grad school project. The California native, who retains a certain hipster aesthetic from his years as a competitive snowboarder, was in his second year of film school at New York University when he starting making a short movie based on the true story of a group of immigrants smuggled into Texas in a refrigerated truck only to be abandoned there.
That short, "Victoria Para Chino," won an honorable mention at the 2005 Sundance Festival, prompting an organizer to ask Fukunaga if he had a feature-length script that could be submitted for a development workshop.
"I told her I did -- which I actually didn't," Fukunaga recalls, reclining into a booth at the hotel bar with a sly smile and the ease of a celebrated Hollywood veteran who had been giving interviews for years.
After the script he crashed on was rejected, Fukunaga packed up and headed to Mexico, attempting to understand life in the slums and gang-ridden areas of the country. He met with social workers, police chiefs, professors and imprisoned members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang. Fukunaga soon realized he wanted to focus on the dangerous journey many immigrants attempt, riding north on the tops of fast-moving freight trains.
The filmmaker visited shelters full of convalescing immigrants who had lost limbs falling from the trains. His research culminated in a 30-hour train ride like the one he intended to write into his movie.
As happens in "Sin Nombre," Fukunaga's train was attacked by a gang.
"The train had stopped in the middle of the night and basically there were gunshots and people started running, screaming, 'Gangs! Gangs!' " he recalls. While other train cars were being held up, he says, "we just waited. There was nowhere to run, and if we were to get off, it'd be really dangerous to try to get back on in the dark. ... Just sitting there waiting to see if we'd be attacked was a unique emotion, to say the least."
The car Fukunaga was riding was passed over, and the filmmaker returned to the States physically unscathed but deeply affected. A fully revised version of "Sin Nombre," which means "without name," was accepted by the Sundance Labs, and by February 2006 it had a producer.
"I would never have been able to write the script without having done that, 'cause you can only learn so much from reading about" immigrant experiences, Fukunaga says. "And I wanted to write from a perspective of experience as well."
Focus Features signed on with funding and agreed to let Fukunaga direct the film. He also did much of the casting.
Since its debut at this year's Sundance, the drama has generated considerable buzz, propelling Fukunaga into a different stratosphere from his peers.
"Life is slowly changing," he says, referring to that solo New York apartment in the works. What he faces now, he adds, "is the pressure of having to conform, following up on an earlier film that's been well received."
To that end, he plans to do something wildly different for his next flick. "I'm actually thinking about a musical," he says flatly.
He's also taking moments to relish the success of "Sin Nombre."
His intention, he says, wasn't to make a political film, but to make a movie that would allow "an audience feel like what it must be like for an immigrant. To create a sort of empathy."
Fukunaga's empathy hasn't eroded since those nights on the train in Mexico. Still stark in the filmmaker's mind is the way the immigrants around him took care of one another, and him, sharing food and coverings when it rained, clinging to one another so no one fell from the train.
"Leaving was probably the hardest thing, because I could go on with my life ... but there was no way to follow up. I don't know if they ever made it or not," he says. "You travel with these people, and they keep walking their path -- and I turned and walked mine."
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