Between his excellent feature debut Sin Nombre, his haunting gothic romance spin on Jane Eyre, and his stunning work on the first season of True Detective, Cary Joji Fukunaga has emerged as one of the most exciting young filmmakers working today. Which is why it was such a shame that his long-developing, two-film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic It fell apart at New Line with Fukunaga departing the project over creative differences.
The director in that past has remained vague about just what exactly led to his exit on It, but in a new interview with Variety touting his next feature effort, Netflix’s first original film and one of this year’s promising awards contenders Beasts of No Nation, Fukunaga has pulled the curtain back on why he left the project:
“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.”
The project seemed to be rolling along, with the plan for the first film to revolve around the characters as children and the second film to focus on them as adults, but hit its first snag when Fukunaga’s choice for Pennywise, Ben Mendelsohn, wasn’t able to star in the film because he committed to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story instead. They then turned their attention to Will Poulter to take on the Pennywise role, but shortly thereafter Fukunaga exited and New Line sought a new take for the adaptation.
Fukunaga says “every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes,” adding he didn’t want to enter production being micro-managed every day. In describing a bit more about his take, it sounds like Fukunaga took a slow-burn, atmospheric approach to the horror as opposed to making a jump scare-filled, conventional, and forgettable horror pic:
“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.”
So yeah, this makes me even more disappointed that we didn’t get to see Fukunaga’s version of It. He goes on to say that he and co-writer Chase Palmer imbued their script with many personal childhood experiences, so he was relieved to hear that New Line is going a different direction with a rewrite for the adaptation (Mama helmer Andy Muschietti is in talks to take over). For what it’s worth, though, an early version of Fukunaga and Palmer’s script did get the approval of one very important person:
“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.”
So yeah, I think we can officially add Fukunaga’s It to the list of unmade projects we desperately wish had come to fruition alongside Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man and David Fincher’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. On the bright side, Fukunaga’s new film Beasts of No Nation opens in limited release and on Netflix on October 16th.
