Antoine Fuqua

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Antoine Fuqua at the 66th Venice Film Festival 2009

Antoine Fuqua (born January 19, 1966 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) is an American director of feature films , music videos and commercials . He gained fame through his crime film Training Day , for which Denzel Washington won the Oscar for best actor in 2002.

Life

Antoine Fuqua grew up in Pittsburgh. He attended West Virginia State University on a scholarship in basketball , where he later studied electrical engineering . He later moved to New York , where he started as a production assistant in film and shot his first short film, Exit , which helped him work in the music video industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, he made a name for himself as a director of music videos. He worked with well-known African American artists such as Prince , Stevie Wonder , Toni Braxton and Usher . The work on Coolio's music video Gangsta's Paradise (1995) won the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video.

After working in the advertising industry, Fuqua made his debut as a feature film director in Hollywood in 1998 with the action film The Replacement Killers . The story of a contract killer (played by Chow Yun-Fat ) in the service of the Chinese Mafia , who refuses to shoot a police officer, has been criticized by the German film service . Fuqua would simply have geared his cinema debut to spectacular action sequences. With his following works, Fuqua remained loyal to the action and thriller genre. In Bait - Fette Beute (2000), Jamie Foxx can be seen as the unsuspecting decoy of the police who is supposed to catch a fugitive bank robber. In Training Day , Denzel Washington slipped into his first role as a villain, a detective sergeant in the drug police who exploited the "war on crime" for his own criminal machinations. The film earned Washington an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2002 . Aldore Collier ( Ebony ) wrote that Fuqua and other African American directors like Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes ( From Hell ) weren't the first black filmmakers to make Hollywood successes. Your directorial work would be the first by African Americans to achieve impressive economic success on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the success of Training Day , Fuqua directed Tears of the Sun (2003), a tough war film about a US unit that is supposed to rescue an American doctor from a mission in civil war-ravaged Nigeria . The production, which stars Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci , was supported by the United States Navy SEALs . Despite a high aesthetic level, German critics criticized the propaganda message that was too clear, that American troops had to save the world.

In 2004 Fuqua directed Lightning in a Bottle, a documentary about the blues that was made at Radio City Music Hall in New York . The film, in which Natalie Cole , Bill Cosby and Macy Gray can be seen, among others , received the Black Reel Award in 2005 for best film comedy or musical. A year later, Fuqua dared to reinterpret the Arthurian legend with King Arthur in which the two British actors Clive Owen and Keira Knightley played the leading roles. Christina Tilmann ( Der Tagesspiegel ) reviewed the film as a "dark winter piece from barbaric times". The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that there was something “strained” about the film, “a mood of having to persevere and clenching your teeth”. The production cost about 120 million US dollars and brought in around 200 million US dollars, a quarter of which was in the USA. After the television drama Murder Book (2005) and the 11-minute short film The Call with John Malkovich and the model Naomi Campbell as priest and dark angel, Fuqua directed Shooter (2007) with Mark Wahlberg as the title hero. Wahlberg interpreted the role of a disaffected ex-sniper of the US Marines , who is said to fall victim to a plot. Michael Kohler (film-dienst) noticed that the director's staging was over- pointed . Fuqua would have "effectively illustrated" the story, but each scene only knows one predetermined outcome, each figure has its expiration date on its forehead.

In 2009, the movie Law of the Street - Brooklyn's Finest , a police thriller about three law enforcement officers ( Richard Gere , Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke ), followed in the Brooklyn's drug scene .

Antoine Fuqua has been married to Lela Rochon since 1999 and has three children. His uncle is the musician Harvey Fuqua ( The Moonglows ). In 2007 Fuqua was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences .

In September 2016 his remake of was The Magnificent Seven ( The Magnificent Seven ) in the cinemas. He is now also planning to remake " Scarface ", of which there are already two versions, again.

In 2018 and 2019 he published one documentary each. First American Dream / American Knightmare about rapper Sue Knight , then What's My Name: Muhammad Ali .

Music videos

Commercials

Feature films

Awards

  • 2002: Black Reel Award for Training Day (Best Director)
  • 2004: nominated for the Black Reel Award for Tears of the Sun (Best Director)
  • 2005: nominated for the Black Reel Award for Lightning in a Bottle (Best Director)
  • 2011: Nominated for the Black Reel Award for Law of the Street - Brooklyn's Finest (Best Director)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. AP : 'Shooter' director Antoine Fuqua fights for self-expression in studio-made action films . March 22, 2007, 7:54 PM GMT, New York (accessed via LexisNexis Economy )
  2. ↑ cf. Antoine Fuqua . In: Contemporary Black Biography , Volume 35. Edited by Ashyia Henderson. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center: African Americans . Farmington Hills, Mich .: Gale, Cengage Learning. 2010.
  3. ↑ cf. Review by Reinhard Lüke in film-dienst 11/1998 (accessed via Munzinger Online )
  4. ↑ cf. Critique by Jörg Gerle in film-dienst 25/2001 (accessed via Munzinger Online )
  5. ↑ quoted from Antoine Fuqua . In: Contemporary Black Biography , Volume 35. Edited by Ashyia Henderson. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center: African Americans . Farmington Hills, Mich .: Gale, Cengage Learning. 2010.
  6. ↑ cf. Critique by Oliver Rahayel in film-dienst 18/2003
  7. ↑ cf. Tilmann, Christina: The Saxons are coming! . In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 19, 2004, No. 18571, p. 26
  8. ↑ cf. Picnic on Hadrian's Wall at faz.net, August 17, 2004 (accessed on May 23, 2010)
  9. ↑ cf. Box office for King Arthur in the Internet Movie Database (accessed May 23, 2010)
  10. ↑ cf. Box Office for King Arthur in Box Office Mojo (accessed January 4, 2011)
  11. ↑ cf. Criticism by Michael Kohler in film-dienst 8/2007 (accessed via Munzinger Online )
  12. ↑ cf. AP : Film Academy Invites 115 New Members . June 18, 2007, 6:44 PM GMT (accessed via LexisNexis Economy )
personal data
SURNAME Fuqua, Antoine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American director for feature films, music videos and commercials
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, USA