Cary Joji Fukunaga (born July 10, 1977) is an American filmmaker. He first gained recognition for writing and directing the 2009 film Sin nombre and the 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre. He was the first director of partial East Asian descent to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, as the director and executive producer of the first season of the HBO series True Detective. He wrote, directed and filmed the 2015 war drama Beasts of No Nation and co-wrote the 2017 Stephen King adaptation It. He directed the 25th James Bond film, No Time to Die (2021).
Fukunaga was born on July 10, 1977 in Oakland, California. His father, Anthony Shuzo Fukunaga, was a third-generation Japanese American, born in an internment camp during World War II. His mother, Gretchen May Grufman, is Swedish-American and worked as a dental hygienist, and later as a college history instructor and university assistant professor of history. Fukunaga inherited his interest in history from her. His parents eventually divorced. His family often relocated within the San Francisco Bay Area, moving to Berkeley, Albany, Vallejo, Benicia, Sebastopol and back to Oakland.
Fukunaga attended Analy High School. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1999 and attended the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, where he studied geopolitics and international law.

Return to Cary Joji Fukunaga Autograph Profile