“True Detective” director Cary Fukunaga has opened up more about his exit from the upcoming It remake, which New Line continues to develop.
Fans of the highly anticipated horror film were upset when he announced he was leaving and many are still wondering what would lead Fukunaga to drop out of such a high profile project.
Now, Fukunaga explains to Variety in greater detail precisely why he no longer wanted to be a part of the remake:
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.
New Line Cinema has set Mama‘s Andy Muschietti to bring Pennywise to the big screen.
It was to have started shooting in late June and a new start date remains unclear. Upon closing of Muschietti’s deal, New Line will begin a search for a new writer to tailor a script to Muschietti’s vision, adds the site. The plan is for the adaptation to still take place over two parts.
No word on if Will Poulter is still cast to play the villainous clown “Pennywise”.
In 1960, seven outcast kids known as “The Loser Club” fight an evil demon who poses as a child-killing clown. 30 years later, they are called back to fight the same clown again.