Cary Fukunaga Shares The Vision For His Two-Part Movie Adaptation Of Stephen King’s ‘It’

“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,” he said, disputing early chatter that cost was the reason he exited the picture. “It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies….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.”

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“The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown,” he continued. “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.”

Fukunaga goes on to say that “millions” were spent on pre-production, but he was being “micro-managed” every step of the way. That said, he does concede: “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 we’ll have to see what direction the project goes in now, but expect something a little more ordinary. Bummer.