By Cary Fukunaga may be one of the most creative directors working now. Sin Nombre is truly stunning and his work on True Detective made the first season fantastic. However, we still don’t know how he’d handle a bigger film, and thanks to his departure from New Line’s two-part It remake we’ll have to wait even longer.
We all could have guessed why he left. He’s an artistic minded filmmaker working for a studio who does horror in a very by-the-books way, but Fukunaga has confirmed that he basically wanted to makes something exciting and the studio wanted something traditional.
“I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience. Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didn’t care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.”
Sounds like some pretty standard stuff when it comes to studios and directors parting ways, though New Line must have known what they were getting into when they brought him on the project. It’s strange they’d second guess him and micro-manage, but the director says that’s what they were doing. It’s too bad as his vision for the remake actually sounds like it would make a remake of It worthwhile.
“The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown. After 30 years of villains that could read the emotional minds of characters and scare them, trying to find really sadistic and intelligent ways he scares children, and also the children had real lives prior to being scared. And all that character work takes time. It’s a slow build, but it’s worth it, especially by the second film. But definitely even in the first film, it pays off.”
Yea, New Line, that just sounds horrible. No one would pay to see something interesting like that. I’d much rather have a scary clown killing a bunch of archetypes. Damn you, Hollywood.
