The Action-Film Director Who’s Taking On Michael Jackson
At an early screening of “Michael,” the new bio-pic based on the life of Michael Jackson, there was silence for a moment after the credits rolled, and then someone exclaimed, “That was fucking awesome!” It was a good omen, although in fairness this was not an unbiased audience. A couple of dozen people had gathered at a sound stage on the Universal Studios lot, in California, for some last-minute trouble-shooting, and so everyone in the room was invested in the film’s success.
“Michael” was designed to be an international crowd-pleaser—the kind of film that executives hope will drag audiences away from their small screens and deposit them in front of big ones, where they can watch and sing along and even dance, if theatres permit it. There was no dancing on this night, unless you counted the projected receipts waltzing through the minds of the people involved. The movie’s lead producer is Graham King, an Englishman who also produced “Bohemian Rhapsody,” about the rock band Queen, which made more than nine hundred million dollars at the box office upon its release, in 2018. King has been working ever since then to bring a Michael Jackson film to theatres, and now only technicalities remained. He suggested that the crowd noise be increased during one of the concert scenes. (The movie has lots of concert scenes.) “Those of us that have been lucky enough to be at a Michael concert, it was fucking chaos,” he said. “You want to feel that.”
One of the people listening was an imposing but soft-spoken guy dressed in black, with a baseball cap nearly covering his eyes. His name is Antoine Fuqua, and for the past few decades he has been among Hollywood’s most successful directors, if not its most celebrated ones. Fuqua is known for films about tough guys on tough missions—especially “Training Day,” the 2001 movie he made with Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington, who played a cop so deliciously crooked that audiences almost forgot to root against him. Fuqua’s filmography also includes “Olympus Has Fallen,” about terrorists attacking the White House, and the “Equalizer” trilogy, in which Washington plays an avenging angel who finds good reasons to do bad things, such as dispatching an enemy by shooting him through a different enemy’s eye socket.
Fuqua likes to say that he specializes in stories about “men under pressure,” and in this sense, at least, “Michael” represents a logical continuation of his life’s work. In other ways, it is a departure: a film built not around gunfights and chases but around re-creations of musical performances. At the Universal Studios screening, Fuqua mentioned some moments when he wanted the music to fade away, the way old Motown songs often did, leaving listeners wanting more. (His older cousin Harvey was a doo-wop singer who became an executive at Motown Records.) But many of his suggestions were subtler: he wanted to make sure that a scene in a New York office had enough New York sounds in the background, and he worried that a few moments of automated dialogue replacement—where actors re-record their lines in a studio—didn’t quite fit the tone. Mainly, though, he seemed happy. “It’s awesome, man,” he said quietly. “I enjoyed it.”
Fuqua’s low-key approach is both a natural expression of his personality and a shrewd stratagem to reassure people around him that everything is under control. Fuqua is in many ways a Hollywood outsider: a Black man from Pittsburgh who honed his skills by shooting music videos and commercials in the nineteen-nineties. Yet something about his manner seems to put people at ease. This is an important skill for anyone who, like Fuqua, aims to make big and broadly entertaining films, and therefore needs to persuade executives to fund them and stars to appear in them. “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Fuqua likes to say, echoing both an old military adage and a line delivered by Mark Wahlberg as an extraordinarily accurate assassin in Fuqua’s film “Shooter.”
“Michael,” which was made in coöperation with Jackson’s estate, has an enormous built-in audience, although it also carries significant risk. Jackson died in 2009, and by the end of his life he was a notorious figure: by his own admission, he had close and sometimes physically affectionate relationships with teen-age and pre-teen-age boys, some of whom accused him of sexual assault, which he denied.
In discussions of people like Michael Jackson, some defenders insist on distinguishing between the artist and the art, but a bio-pic is necessarily about both. Jackson’s sublime pop-soul confections—“Billie Jean,” “Rock with You,” and countless others—remain extraordinarily popular, and the people with the strongest attachment to this music tend to share an attachment to its creator. “Michael” is not an ambivalent meditation on the complicated relationship between goodness and greatness but an unabashed celebration of its subject, based on the bet that, a decade and a half after Jackson’s death, audiences are ready to celebrate him, too.
This past November, when the trailer for “Michael” was released on YouTube, it was viewed more than a hundred million times in the first twenty-four hours—a promising sign for Lionsgate, which, with other companies, has invested something like a hundred and fifty million dollars in the film. The title role is played by Jaafar Jackson, the son of Michael’s brother Jermaine, with a shy smile that’s faintly familiar and frenetic dance moves that are strongly familiar. But, to the extent that “Michael” is about a man under pressure, that man is Joe Jackson, the star’s domineering father, played by Colman Domingo with an intensity that would not be out of place in one of Fuqua’s more combat-driven films.
In his career, Fuqua has worked to make himself difficult to categorize; not long after the success of “Training Day,” he went to Ireland to film “King Arthur,” a battlefield epic starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. His goal, often, has been to give audiences movies that feel like thrill rides, but nowadays he talks more about the responsibility to tell stories about Black people in particular. He fought hard to make “Emancipation,” a 2022 slavery drama starring Will Smith. And he tends to describe “Michael” less as a potential blockbuster than as an act of historical reclamation. “Michael’s too important a character for our culture to just walk away from,” he told me.
Fuqua’s résumé includes seventeen features and half a dozen documentaries, along with film and television projects for which he served as producer or executive producer. (“The Terminal List,” in which Chris Pratt plays a renegade Navy SEAL, will release its second season on Prime Video later this year.) But he has never been nominated for a major award, and, though he lives outside Los Angeles, he is much more comfortable working out at his local boxing gym than appearing at industry events. Still, his profession occasionally requires self-promotion, which is how he found himself walking through Park City, Utah, on a bright January morning, heading to a promotional panel at the Sundance Film Festival. Fuqua is tall and broad and looks like a former football player, although in fact his sport of choice was basketball: he earned a scholarship to West Virginia State, a historically Black college, and then transferred to West Virginia University.
When Fuqua arrived in Utah, “Michael” was nearly finished, and he was taking a break to focus on a very different man under pressure: Nelson Mandela, the subject of his new documentary “Troublemaker,” which was having its première at Sundance. On the street, Fuqua was stopped by autograph collectors clutching posters for “Training Day” and “The Equalizer.” He signed them quickly, then retreated into a makeshift greenroom on the second floor of the Filmmaker Lodge. There he met his co-panelist: Billie Jean King, the tennis trailblazer, astonishingly sharp and trim at eighty-two. “It’s an honor,” she said, and Fuqua bowed respectfully. He gets along particularly well with athletes, perhaps because he admires them so much; he says that one of the most difficult things he ever did was accept that he was not going to play professional basketball.
Onstage, Fuqua and King, who was promoting her own new documentary, talked about the link between sports and activism. Fuqua once directed a documentary about Muhammad Ali, and King shared her memories of getting to know him: “He’d go, ‘Billie Jean King, you’re the queen.’ ” Fuqua had been pleased to discover, during the research for his film, that Mandela was an amateur boxer. He liked the idea that a liberation hero who is often memorialized in America as an icon of nonviolence was in reality a fighter. “The only way you’re going to change anything—you’ve got to win,” he said.
Fuqua grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father was a foreman at an H. J. Heinz factory and his mother worked for Volkswagen and for the city health department. The decisive event of his childhood involved, fittingly enough, gunfire and a panicked dash. When he was fifteen, he says, he and a friend were shot at by a mechanic who mistook them for thieves; he ran through a nearby alley before realizing that blood was seeping into his imitation-leather jacket, and the next thing he knew he was in an ambulance. “We lived in what people might say is the hood, but there wasn’t shooting on a regular basis,” his mother, Mary, told me. “There’s no way to protect your child in a situation like that.”
The bullet passed through Fuqua’s arm without much damage, but after the shooting he found himself drawn to the safety of movie theatres; he was fascinated by steely protagonists, like James Cagney’s vicious outlaw in “White Heat.” In college, when he wasn’t playing basketball or studying engineering, he dreamed of becoming a director, and in 1987 he moved to New York to see if it was possible. He worked a series of production-assistant jobs, where he picked up some ideas about how to run a set, and also about how to say no. On one shoot, for a TV commercial, he was assigned to scrub a section of street with a broom and a bucket, so that it would look better on camera. He quit P.A. work that day, resolving to scrape together money to make a short film: a surreal gangster melodrama about a drug dealer haunted by his guilty conscience. “Very ‘film student,’ ” Fuqua says now, even though he never went to film school.
Eventually, Fuqua moved to Los Angeles and found his way into Propaganda Films, an ideal place for an aspiring filmmaker. The agency, co-founded by Steve Golin, was known for making music videos, but over time it assembled perhaps the era’s most impressive roster of directors, including Michael Bay, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, and Mark Romanek. Fuqua was just about the only Black director in the office, and he developed a specialty in Black music, with a knack for creating vivid little movies on tight budgets. Steve Golin’s brother, Larry, a screenwriter, was close with Fuqua and admired his ability to honor the prime directive of music videos: the star must look cool. “We used to tease him about silk pajamas and diamonds and champagne glasses,” Golin recalls. “He was very skilled at giving the labels what they wanted—but upgraded.” For Prince’s song “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” Fuqua put the singer on a small stage, serenading a variety of women as they sat for portraits, their faces transformed by his Princely glow. The song became a Top Ten hit—the last one of Prince’s career.
Fuqua’s reputation for working with Black musicians brought in work, but he worried that it also limited him. His clients seemed to get much lower budgets than their white counterparts in bands like Aerosmith did. “I would see these videos, man—they’re huge, they got helicopters,” he told me. “And I’m getting forty thousand dollars, maybe thirty thousand.” Ultimately, though, this reputation was what helped him break out of his niche. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer had a new movie called “Dangerous Minds,” about a white teacher in a Black and Hispanic school, and he needed someone to direct a video for the soundtrack. Bruckheimer sent Fuqua the song: “Gangsta’s Paradise,” by an emerging rapper named Coolio. Fuqua imagined a video featuring Coolio and the movie’s star, Michelle Pfeiffer, on an unglamorous set—no silk pajamas required. Bruckheimer suggested that he call Pfeiffer and ask her to join the shoot. Fuqua remembers being slightly intimidated: “I was, like, ‘You want me to call Michelle Pfeiffer?’ ” But Pfeiffer told me that she considered herself lucky to have been asked. “I was very flattered, because the last thing I thought of myself was that I was cool in any way,” she said.
They shot late into the night, with Pfeiffer and Coolio facing off in what looked like an interrogation room. (Coolio scowls; Pfeiffer looks stern and—objectively speaking—cool in a black leather jacket.) The video helped the song become a hit, which helped the movie become a hit, and all of it established Fuqua as a stylish and streetwise director, equally comfortable with movie stars and rappers. Soon afterward, he resolved to stop making music videos entirely; while figuring out his first feature film, he would concentrate on television commercials, because the pay was better and racial typecasting was less of a concern.
One of the best indicators of Fuqua’s early reputation is a recording of an interview with the rapper Tupac Shakur, from 1995, a few months after “Gangsta’s Paradise” was released. Shakur was talking to Monster Kody Scott, a much feared member of the Eight Tray Gangster Crips. Scott had written a best-selling memoir, “Monster,” and he was excitedly telling Shakur about plans to adapt it into a film. “The director is Antoine Fuqua, a young brother,” Scott said. “A straight-up cat—like us.” Fuqua was spending long hours at Propaganda’s headquarters, watching fellow-directors at work in editing bays, but in his downtime he had got to know a number of figures from the city’s gang culture. Anne-Marie Mackay, an executive at Propaganda, remembers marvelling at his ability to move between worlds. “He could deal with the most dangerous situations and come out unscathed,” she recalls.
“Monster” was supposed to be Fuqua’s début, but he couldn’t secure funding, so he signed on to direct a different kind of gangster movie: “The Replacement Killers,” a trans-Pacific crime drama set in Los Angeles but starring the Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat. It took Fuqua a few years to find his way. He still winces at the mention of “Bait,” a little-loved comedy starring Jamie Foxx, whose character is at one point moved to declare, “Oh, my nuts! My balls. My balls.”
In time, though, Fuqua found partners as serious-minded as he was. As he began work on “Training Day,” he met Ethan Hawke at a hotel bar in L.A. to recruit him to play an earnest rookie cop named Jake Hoyt. “We talked for hours,” Hawke told me. “We got so feverishly passionate discussing ‘Apocalypse Now,’ a total stranger interrupted us to ask if we were O.K.”
The script, by David Ayer, was ruthless and unsentimental, and it gave Fuqua a chance to combine the stylized imagery he had used in videos with his own interest in moral fables and the code of the streets. He shot some of the film in South Central Los Angeles, relying on his neighborhood relationships to cast extras and to keep the peace. As he tells it, he called a meeting of influential figures, including Cle (Bone) Sloan, a gang member who had recently been released from prison. (Sloan later directed a documentary about the history of street gangs, which Fuqua produced.) “I said, ‘I’m going to do this movie with Denzel, and I’m bringing it to the hood,’ ” Fuqua told me. “Every hood was, like, ‘Come on through.’ Latinos, the Blacks, the Bloods, the Crips. I had no issues.”
It helped, of course, that he had Washington. The two men attended the same Pentecostal church, but they didn’t know each other well when Fuqua pitched him a role in “Training Day.” They have now made five films together, which have grossed about eight hundred and thirty-five million dollars, making them one of the most bankable duos in Hollywood. At various times in our conversations, Fuqua compared Washington to Miles Davis (“You’ve just got to know that sometimes he’s going to do his thing”) and Muhammad Ali (“You can give some instructions, but he’s still going to be Ali”). Washington’s glowering intensity matches the purposeful mood that Fuqua likes to evoke: viewers get the pleasurable sensation of watching a man who refuses to be distracted or dissuaded.
In “Training Day,” of course, Washington’s character, Alonzo Harris, is a bad guy: probably worse than the criminals whom he abets and, when it’s convenient, dispatches, and definitely worse than Hawke’s character, who is assigned to be his partner. (The forthright contrast between Black vice and white virtue seems, perhaps, even more transgressive now than it did back in 2001.) The film takes place over the course of one very overstuffed day, during which it gradually becomes clear that Alonzo has got himself too deep into trouble to get out again; he is finally surrounded by gang members determined to enforce local standards of justice. In one version of the script, Alonzo managed to escape, but Washington and Fuqua decided against it. “To justify Alonzo Harris’s living in the worst way, he had to die in the worst way,” Washington once said in an interview. During the climactic scene, his character bellows, “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!,” and his delivery is so commanding that the line is often remembered as a declaration of invincibility, rather than as the last gasp of a doomed man.
In some ways, “Training Day” was misleading: it was a film built around a charismatic villain, made by a director who proved to be more interested in heroism. One of the only figures in Fuqua’s filmography who resembles Alonzo is Suge Knight, the real-life hip-hop executive known for his bullying—and sometimes violent—approach to business and life. In 2018, Fuqua made a documentary called “American Dream / American Knightmare,” in which Knight tells his own story, uncontradicted, so that viewers can make up their own minds about how wicked he really is.
Most of Fuqua’s features are anchored by men more like Robert McCall, Washington’s character in the “Equalizer” films, whose skills and moral code are both superhuman. “He’s St. Michael, stepping on the Devil’s head,” Fuqua said. “And sometimes that’s necessary.” The first “Equalizer” film was a remake of a nineteen-eighties television series that starred the English actor Edward Woodward as a suave former intelligence agent turned vigilante. Washington’s version of McCall is disciplined but damaged, and possibly afflicted with something like obsessive-compulsive disorder. “He needed things to be together, and to fit, because he wasn’t together, and things didn’t fit,” Washington said, around the time the first film was released. “He’s not just some mindless super guy who goes around, you know, kicking butt. He’s struggling.” In one famous scene, the camera zooms in on Washington’s eye as he surveys a room full of Russian gangsters, taking inventory of the possible weapons: a gun, a knife, a glass tumbler, a corkscrew. “Sixteen seconds,” he whispers, and he starts a timer on his watch before methodically reducing the room’s living population to one. “I’m sorry,” he says, even more quietly, once his bloody work is done, and the apology allows viewers to make believe that the violence is a necessary evil, instead of the whole point.
One of Fuqua’s favorite directors is Akira Kurosawa, whose film “Seven Samurai” was reimagined by John Sturges as the classic Western “The Magnificent Seven.” Those two films are commonly described as meditations on the futility of violence in a world where justice takes the form of endless attacks and reprisals. Fuqua remade the Western in 2016, filling the cast with big names: he reunited Washington and Hawke, and added Chris Pratt and Peter Sarsgaard. After a chaotic climax, Fuqua gives viewers an unambiguous message, delivered in voice-over by the woman who had recruited the belligerents:
This was not a subtle conclusion, but it reflected Fuqua’s preference for clarity: his films are full of well-lit faces, crisp sounds (like the racking of a pistol), and sharp moral lines. “I would love to tell a story about a diabolical motherfucker—but he’s got to be unapologetic,” Fuqua told me. “You’re either on this side of things, or you’re all in on this side. There’s no gray.” The tension in his films usually comes from finding out whether and how his protagonist is going to succeed, not from wondering what kind of person he really is. In 2009, Hawke starred alongside Wesley Snipes and Don Cheadle in a Fuqua film called “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a sprawling cop thriller. “I remember Richard Gere coming to set and saying it had been a long time since he’d been in a room with that much testosterone,” Hawke told me.
Over the years, Fuqua stayed so busy that he sometimes seemed to be running his own studio. Unlike the director Tyler Perry, whose devotion to telling Black stories inspired him to build a parallel version of Hollywood in Atlanta, Fuqua has always been intent on succeeding within Hollywood itself. Depending on his mood, he can seem either proud or distressed that he’s not always thought of as a member of the industry élite. “You don’t need to shake everybody’s hand,” he told me one afternoon. “As long as you’re doing quality work, and you’re being a gentleman about it, then you’re good.” But he is also intensely aware that his work tends not to win recognition. “This time of year kills me,” he said. It was March, and many of his peers were getting ready for the Academy Awards, which have generally ignored his films. The major exception is “Training Day,” for which Washington won Best Actor. Accepting the trophy, Washington hailed Fuqua as “a brilliant young filmmaker, African American filmmaker.” Peering out at the audience, he added, “I don’t know where you are, Antoine—love you.” Fuqua was sitting near the back of the theatre, unseen not only by Washington but also by the television cameras. “Some of the reporters didn’t even know I was the director,” he recalled. “It wasn’t popular, being a Black director back then.”
Fuqua thought he had another chance at acclaim a few years ago, with “Emancipation,” a Will Smith film inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of a man who had escaped slavery exhibiting the scars on his back. It was an Apple Studios production, with a budget of more than a hundred million dollars, and Fuqua persuaded the venerable cinematographer Robert Richardson to serve as the director of photography. This was despite Richardson’s aversion to the local fauna in Louisiana, where much of the movie was shot. “I do not appreciate either snakes or alligators,” Richardson told me. Like many collaborators, he came away impressed by Fuqua’s ability to gently persuade people around him to do things they might initially oppose, such as bringing a crew to a remote location in the rural South. (The shoot was initially supposed to take place in Georgia, but Fuqua and Smith moved it, to protest new state voting laws that they described as “reminiscent of voting impediments that were passed at the end of Reconstruction.”) Richardson told me that Fuqua’s knack for getting his way reminded him of other directors he had worked with: Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino. “There’s not one of those four that you can honestly say no to,” he said.
The greatest asset that “Emancipation” had was its star—at least until the moment during the editing process when bewildered friends began calling Fuqua to ask, “Is this real?” Smith had slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Academy Awards, and was suddenly one of the most despised actors in America. Fuqua considered trying to broker a summit between the two men, but eventually he decided that it wasn’t his business, and that there was probably nothing he could do to rescue the film. Reviews were mixed, and Smith could not effectively promote the movie; everyone he talked to wanted to know about the slap, and he never settled on a compelling explanation. “It was almost like people were angry at all of us, for making it,” Fuqua told me. “Whether it would have went to the Academy Awards or not—I always have that in my mind.”
Fuqua did not always think of Michael Jackson as someone whose story he was meant to tell. “Early on in my career, I probably would have said, ‘I don’t know if that’s me,’ ” he told me. He remembers that, back when he was first establishing himself, someone mentioned the opportunity to direct a Jackson video. “It was huge, but I wasn’t running towards it,” he said. In the nineties, hip-hop was toughening up the sound of American popular music; Jackson, fey and theatrical, seemed increasingly distant from the cultural mainstream. In time, though, Fuqua came to see Jackson less as an anomaly than as an archetype: strange, but not much stranger than the show-business world he had been forced to navigate since childhood.
If Fuqua thought that a bio-pic about a pop star would be less gruelling to make than a slavery drama filmed in a Louisiana swamp, he was wrong. The film is built around music, and Jackson’s lyrics do not neatly tell his life story; there is no evidence that he ever told a would-be street fighter to “beat it.” Perhaps more significantly, Graham King, the producer, needed approval for the music from the Jackson estate, effectively giving it veto power over the project. A Michael Jackson movie without Michael Jackson songs was unlikely to be a global blockbuster.
Production was delayed by the 2023 strikes in Hollywood, but “Michael” remained one of the most highly anticipated films on the release schedule, as well as one of the most carefully guarded, with King and Fuqua saying little about their plans. When shooting finally began, Fuqua thought that he’d found a way to deploy the adrenalized style he’s known for. He shot a surprising action sequence: a reënactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, Jackson’s home and personal amusement park, on the far outskirts of Santa Barbara. After searching the premises, officers had examined and photographed Jackson’s body, to compare it with descriptions from Jordan Chandler, a thirteen-year-old boy who had accused Jackson of touching his penis during one of their sleepovers. Chandler’s family sued, and Jackson settled for about twenty-three million dollars; afterward, Chandler stopped coöperating with prosecutors, and the investigation was closed.
The raid marked the end of the era in which Jackson’s eccentricity—his morphing appearance, his obsession with animals, and above all his love for children—seemed like something to chuckle about. In 2005, Jackson faced ten charges related to the alleged abuse of another thirteen-year-old. Though he was acquitted on all counts, the allegations threatened to overshadow his music—especially after the release, in 2019, of “Leaving Neverland,” a documentary that told the stories of two more alleged victims. Amid widespread reconsideration of prominent people accused of wrongdoing, some wondered whether Jackson might disappear from playlists.
It turned out, though, that it’s much harder to stop listening to Jackson’s songs than it is to stop watching Woody Allen’s films or “The Cosby Show.” Part of the problem is that his influence is so huge; the Canadian singer known as the Weeknd has become one of the most popular performers in the world with his moody, artful update of Jackson’s music. On Broadway, “MJ the Musical” has been running for more than four years, encouraging theatregoers to let their love of Jackson’s hits outweigh concerns about his life. And, though his songs have been mainly absent from television ads, the animated film “The Bad Guys 2” used “Bad” in a trailer last year. The legal fights aren’t over; a case against Jackson’s estate, filed by the two primary accusers from “Leaving Neverland,” is scheduled to go to trial this fall. But it has now been more than fifteen years since Jackson’s death, and the public outrage seems to be fading, perhaps because Jackson is increasingly viewed as a troubled figure from the past, rather than a troublesome figure in the present.
Fuqua hadn’t planned to downplay the controversy that engulfed Jackson in his final decades. Instead, he envisioned a film that might have read as a provocative defense of its subject. Describing the scene of the raid, he told me, “I shot him being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster.” Fuqua is not convinced that Jackson did what he is accused of doing, despite the number of accusers (five) and the fact that Jackson publicly talked about sharing his bed with boys. “When I hear things about us—Black people in particular, especially in a certain position—there’s always pause,” Fuqua told me. He mentioned the facts of Elvis Presley’s life, suggesting there was a double standard. (Presley met his future wife, Priscilla, when she was fourteen, and she moved to Memphis to be with him at seventeen.) He was skeptical of some of the accusers’ parents, particularly Chandler’s father, a dentist and sometime screenwriter named Evan Chandler, who was recorded threatening to insure that Jackson was “humiliated beyond belief.” (Evan Chandler died by suicide in 2009, a few months after Jackson’s death.) Fuqua stressed that he didn’t know the truth of the allegations against Jackson. But, he said, “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.”
Fuqua does much of his work at home, in his pool house, where he likes to watch old films as he researches new ones, and where everybody knows not to bother him if the door is closed. Movies are now the family business. In 1999, he married the actor Lela Rochon (“Waiting to Exhale”). His son Brando is an aspiring director who attends the University of Southern California, and his other two children work for his production company—Asia, his daughter, appears briefly in “Michael,” playing the actress who plays Jackson’s girlfriend in the “Thriller” video.
When Fuqua needs to preside over meetings, he drives to Santa Monica, where he rents office space in a post-production studio. In one room, the walls are decorated with posters from his many films, including both hits (“Olympus Has Fallen”) and misses (“Tears of the Sun,” a Bruce Willis war story set in Nigeria). Fuqua is a linear storyteller, whose best movies are distinguished by momentum, and by what Hawke calls the “musicality” of his shots. “When his camera is rolling, I always hear the soundtrack,” Hawke told me. Jamie Marshall, who worked as an assistant director on a number of Fuqua’s films, was struck by his ability to insure that actors never feel rushed, even when the producers start to sweat. “He’ll rehearse for eight hours, everyone’s freaking out, and then he shoots the scene, bangs it out in an hour and a half,” Marshall said. Fuqua’s facility helps explain both his continued success and, perhaps, his relatively low profile. “He’s a shooter in the oldest sense of the word—the set pieces, and the choreography around it,” one executive who has made films with him said. “What he does is deceptively complicated, because he elevates genre, and he does it so seamlessly. People take for granted how good he is.”
Even as Fuqua was finishing “Michael,” he had begun work on a very different kind of bio-pic: “Hannibal,” a Netflix film with Denzel Washington in the title role. The racial identity of the historical Hannibal, who led the armies of ancient Carthage against Rome, does not map neatly onto modern categories: he was Mediterranean, possibly resembling present-day inhabitants of the Arab world. But Fuqua’s Hannibal is recognizably Black—an African insurgent taking on a European empire. “It’s incredible what we can achieve,” Fuqua said. “Ninety thousand men, thirty-seven elephants, and all the supplies that had to go with all that, over the Alps. That’s a hell of a campaign.”
One recent afternoon, Fuqua convened a meeting at his office to figure out how, exactly, this campaign would be brought to life. Richardson, the cinematographer, was there, and so was Sled Reynolds, who since the nineteen-eighties has been one of Hollywood’s most accomplished animal wranglers. Reynolds was dressed in a safari hat, as if prepared to wrangle any animal that happened to wander in off the Santa Monica Freeway. “The first thing we’ve got to get into is the elephant of it all,” Fuqua said. He was preparing to scout locations in Italy, which meant he needed to scout some elephants, too.
Reynolds suggested that the inventory was low in local zoos. He guessed that there were seven or eight elephants in Italy, and “none of them have tusks.” They discussed the possibility of prosthetic tusks, or even digitized ones, and considered whether it was important for Hannibal’s elephant, like its rider, to be recognizably African. (Asian elephants are smaller, with differently shaped heads and ears.)
Fuqua had created hundreds of pages of storyboards, specifying countless details, but he knew that the success of “Hannibal” would ultimately depend not just on verisimilitude but on how cool its hero looked as he trudged off to war. “Whatever we do with the elephants, they should look massive,” he said.
In 2024, after principal photography on “Michael” was finished, Fuqua got some shocking news from Graham King. Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family turned out to include an agreement that forbade the estate to participate in depictions of the events around Chandler’s allegation. The film that Fuqua had made was essentially unreleasable—not because Fuqua was too critical of Jackson but, in a sense, because he was too eager to defend him.
Fuqua thought about abandoning the project, but ultimately agreed to reconceive it instead. Even if he couldn’t engage with the accusations, he could still defend Jackson, by reminding audiences of all that he endured during his rise from overworked child star to over-worshipped pop phenomenon. In the film, we see Jackson rehearsing with his brothers and visiting sick children in the hospital; often, we see him alone, kept company only by a rather uncanny digital facsimile of his chimpanzee, Bubbles. The revised “Michael” ends in the late eighties, with Jackson triumphant and his reputation intact. Instead of chronicling his downfall, Fuqua merely chronicles his rise—and, you might say, his emancipation. It is, as King calls it, a “nostalgia journey.” Jaafar Jackson, who had never acted before, told me that Fuqua sometimes approached him after a take to deliver reassurance, saying, “Wherever you are right now, stay in that zone.”
“Michael” might be Fuqua’s first feature since “Training Day” with a villain at its center. The villain, though, is not Michael Jackson but his father, Joe, whose determination to get his boys out of Gary, Indiana, turns into something more poisonous. “At some point, you become diabolical,” Fuqua said. “You get seduced by the money and the power.” In conversations with Colman Domingo, Fuqua emphasized that Joe was also a strong, if flawed, avatar of African American fatherhood. “We talked about Black men who grew up pre-civil rights, and what the responsibilities were for them to raise their children, and what they were up against,” Domingo told me. In the film, Michael Jackson spends much of his time reacting to the strictures and provocations of his father, who tells him, “Nobody else will understand you, outside this place.” The dark message of the film is that this might be true.
If “Michael” succeeds, it will be because theatregoers are too enthralled to dwell on this possibility. Fuqua and King are considering a sequel, which might use some of the incendiary footage that they have already shot. For now, though, a tortuous contractual process has led to a film that is surprisingly straightforward: a story of triumph where the tragedy exists only in the subtext, and in the unspoken possibility that a brilliant and sensitive boy, growing up in fear of his father, might turn out to be not just a victim but a perpetrator, too.
Even with no scenes related to the allegations of abuse, “Michael” has exposed divisions within the family. Jackson’s daughter, Paris, said on Instagram that the movie “panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy,” and she has blamed the estate for not realizing earlier that the Chandler story line might pose legal problems. (John Branca, a former lawyer for Jackson and an executor of his estate, has an additional relationship with the film: he is a character in it, portrayed by Miles Teller as one of Jackson’s most effective protectors.) The New York Post recently reported that, at a preview screening, Michael’s sister Janet “criticized everything, from the performances to the makeup.” (Janet Jackson, pop royalty in her own right, asked not to be included in the film.)
When the film opens, on April 24th, Jackson’s obsessive fans will have a chance to render their own verdict, and so will what remains of the moviegoing public. A few weeks ago, Deadline reported that advance ticket sales suggested “Michael” might have an even bigger opening weekend than “Bohemian Rhapsody” did, and so far any public backlash to the concept of a pro-Michael Jackson film has been muted.
Fuqua can’t pretend not to care about how well “Michael” does at the box office, but he has constructed his career to insure that he stays busy, no matter what. On the day that he had to make final changes to “Michael,” he was in New York, after a trip to Italy to scout locations for “Hannibal.” He saw a few things that could be improved—the lighting of Michael’s boyhood home in one scene didn’t quite match the lighting in a different one. But, a few hours later, sitting in a hotel lobby, he seemed pleased that his work was finished. “I came back, went upstairs for a minute, washed my face,” he told me. “That’s it. There’s nothing else I can do.” ♦