Cary Fukunaga reveals new details on the collapse of his It remake

Despite an intense dislike of clowns, Cary Fukunaga's remake of IT was something I was actually quite looking forward to. His approach to what would be a two-film adaptation of the Stephen King novel sounded ambitious and unique, but alas, it was not to be as Fukunaga later departed the film citing "creative differences."

Cary Fukunaga has commented on his reasons for leaving previously, but has since elaborated on his exit from the film in a new interview with Variety.

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.

So essentially, Fukanaga wanted to give us something with passion behind it and New Line wanted the same old with a few jump scares thrown in; why can't we have nice things? As the production moved closer and closer to getting underway, Fukanaga found that New Line was micro-managing him to such a degree that he knew he wasn't going to be able to make the film he wanted.

It was being rejected. Every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes. Our conversations weren’t dramatic. It was just quietly acrimonious. 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.

Both Fukanaga and Chase Palmer, who co-wrote the film, invested years in the script which contained much of their childhood. After exiting the film, Fukanaga was fearful that New Line would take their script and "bastardize it," so he was thankful that the studio has decided to perform a rewrite. Fukanaga mentioned that he wasn't 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." I've got nothing against remakes for the most part, but I'd rather see a remake do something different than merely serve as an updated version that can't hope to live up to the original.

So IT may live on in some form, but it seems like Cary Fukunaga's vision of the film has been lost. At least he's earning some rave reviews with BEASTS OF NO NATION, which has just premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and will be released on Netflix on October 16, 2015.