Way back in 2015, “True Detective” season one director Cary Fukunaga had been attached to direct IT for New Line, a film that Andy Muschietti of course ended up knocking out of the park. Fukunaga and Chase Palmer had spent years working on the script and were *this* close to filming before they exited the project, with Will Poulter set to play their Pennywise.

So what exactly happened? Speaking with GQ, Fukunaga offers new details this week. Ultimately, he says, it came down to New Line fearing he wouldn’t be a team player.

“It was fear on [New Line’s] part, that they couldn’t control me,” Fukunaga told the site. “I would have been a total collaborator. That was the kind of ridiculous part. It was just more a perception. I have never seen a note and been like, ‘Fuck you guys. No way.’ It’s always been a conversation.”

He continued, “I don’t think I’ve ever been able to make something uncompromising. Like, someone commented on Beasts [of No Nation], ‘Oh, how did it feel to make a movie that’s uncompromising?’ Like, uncompromising? I had to rewrite my entire third act ’cause we didn’t have the money to finish the film. We compromise all over the place.”

After his departure from the project in 2015, Fukunaga had mostly cited creative differences about the approach as being the reason he left. He told EW at the time, “Ultimately, we and New Line have to agree on the kind of movie we want to make, and we just wanted to make different movies.” He later dug further in a chat with Variety, also in 2015…

“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. 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.

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.

We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it. 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.”

It’s hard to know *exactly* what happened behind the scenes, but it all turned out for the best with Muschietti at the helm. So you won’t find us complaining, that’s for damn sure.