While the first season of "True Detective" was guided entirely by director Cary Fukunaga, the second season (which he hasn’t seen, by the way), dropped the practice of having one director at the helm and instead went through a roster of filmmakers, with the most notable perhaps being Justin Lin ("Fast Five," "Star Trek Beyond") and John Crowley ("Boy A," "Brooklyn"). Others were rumored, including William Friedkin and Andrew Dominik, but those directors didn’t end up taking the gig. Now another director explains fairly bluntly why he declined working on the series.
"The heat is in TV," David Cronenberg said at the Reykjavik International Film Festival where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award (via Indiewire). "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.”
Damn. So, if I’m doing the math, Lin eventually picked up Cronenberg’s leftovers. And it’s hard to fault the Canadian director for choosing not to do the series, even if his assessment of the first episode is a big harsh (it was more muddled than outright awful, and it was a problem that plagued the season as a whole).
Thoughts? Smart move by Cronenberg, or would you have liked to see him take on the pulpy material? Let us know below.
