David Cronenberg explains why he passed on True Detective Season 2

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

You can approach David Cronenberg all you want to potentially direct your project, but, if the script isn’t good, you’re not going to get him to bite.

That’s ultimately what caused the filmmaker to walk away from conversations to direct the first episode of TRUE DETECTIVE’s Season 2 for HBO. He thought about it for a little bit, because TV is a strong storytelling medium right now and… well, he has bills to pay, but when push came to shove, he could not pull the trigger.

The heat is in TV. Last year I was approached to direct the first episode of the second season of True Detective, I considered it but I thought that the script was bad, so I didn’t do it. In TV, the director is just a traffic cop, but on the other hand it is work and there’s a lot of it.

I can’t really blame him. That first episode of TRUE DETECTIVE was incredibly slow and very jumbled and didn’t seem to really go anywhere, except to introduce us to way too many characters in a short span of time. Things did get much better in later episodes, but, by then, it would have been too late. Cronenberg’s interest was lost. Speaking of lost…