Many where left surprise when supposed director of Stephen King's "It" movie remake, Cary Fukunaga announced his exit from the project.
While there have been reports claiming that it was about the movie's budget, the 38-year-old film director clarified the real reason why he left.
In an interview with Variety for a cover story of his film "Beasts of No Nation," Fukunaga revealed that New Line studio is now "looking to hire a new director" who will replace the script that he's written with Chase Palmer.
With an agreed $32 million budget, Fukunaga planned on making "It" into a two-part film. However, he did admit that there had been disagreements between him and the studio over creativity.
"I was trying to make an unconventional horror film," he admitted.
"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.
Apparently, Cary Fukunaga was looking into turning Stephen King's iconic villain Pennywise the clown into something more.
"The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown," he explained.
"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.
And while he shared a bunch of ideas with New Line, he claimed that it was constantly being rejected.
"It was being rejected. Every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes. Our conversations weren't dramatic. It was just quietly acrimonious."
Additionally, Fukunaga explained that while there where no drama involved in their conversations, being micro-managed did not sit well for him.
"We didn't want to make the same movie. We'd already spent millions on pre-production. I certainly did not want to make a movie where I was being micro-managed all the way through production, so I couldn't be free to actually make something good for them. I never desire to screw something up. I desire to make something as good as possible."
And while all his work with the supposed "It" movie remake did not go as plan, he is still glad that New Line is actually loooking to scratch everything because he did not want their script to be "basterdized."
"We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it," he explained.
"Chase and I both put our childhood in that story. So our biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it. So I'm actually thankful that they are going to rewrite the script. I wouldn't want them to stealing our childhood memories and using that. I mean, I'm not sure if the fans would have liked what I would had done. I was honoring King's spirit of it, but I needed to update it. King saw an earlier draft and liked it."
With no confirmation yet, New Line is reportedly eyeing on "Mama" director Andy Muschietti to replace Fukunaga in the directorial chair.
The release date to Stephen King's "It" movie remake has yet to be scheduled.
