Having delivered the masterful first season of True Detective and completed his hotly anticipated Beasts Of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga's next project was, for a time, set to be a two-film adaptation of Stephen King's It. Pre-production was underway, details were emerging and some casting was announced, but then, suddenly, it wasn't happening after all. Fukunaga has now given his version of what went down, placing the blame squarely with studio New Line. "It was quietly acrimonious," he says.
Fukunaga's plan was to devote a film each to the massive novel's two halves: one for the group of childhood friends who battle the unspeakable evil, and the other for the 25-years-later strand when the friends reunite as adults to destroy It once and for all.
That wasn't a problem according to the director, and neither, he says, did he have a beef with the surprisingly meagre sounding $32m budget. Creative control was the sticking point.
"I was trying to make an unconventional horror film," Fukunaga tells Variety. "It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what [New Line] knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience. 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."
Another specific problem was apparently around Pennywise, the clown form that the It entity most often takes to appear to the children (and a lasting emotional scar for the generation that remembers Tim Curry in the role).
"The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown," the director continues. "After 30 years of villains that could read the emotional minds of characters and scare them, [I was] trying to find really sadistic and intelligent ways he scares children. 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. [But New Line] didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. Every little thing was being rejected. We didn’t want to make the same movie."
New Line have declined to comment so far, so this remains a one-sided story. And Fukunaga actually admits that, despite approval and encouragement from King, "I’m not sure if the fans would have liked what I would had done". He says that he and his co-writer Chase Palmer had plundered their own childhood memories for some of the character work, and is thankful that those elements now won't be used, as New Line are starting over with a new script.
So we'll never get to see Fukunaga's version, but that last line does reveal that the studio haven't abandoned the project altogether. It remains in development, but won't arrive quite as soon as we thought. Time will tell whether Will Poulter will remain attached as Pennywise.
Onwards and upwards, Fukunaga's possible future projects include French military drama The Black Count, and a TV mini-series adapted from Caleb Carr's The Alienist. His Beasts Of No Nation, starring Idris Elba, makes its UK debut at the BFI London Film Festival on October 8.