Director Alan Taylor has been chatting about two of his highest-profile projects, and his thoughts on why they didn’t turn out as he hoped.
To say that Alan Taylor has worked on a range of projects throughout his directorial career, is something of an understatement. The filmmaker has not only helmed episodes of TV for some of the most revered shows of the last few years – Sex And The City, The Sopranos, Lost, Mad Men and of course, Game of Thrones – but he’s also made some huge blockbuster films too, in the form of Thor: The Dark World and Terminator: Genisys.
It was his work on Game Of Thrones that clinched his appointment for the 2013 Thor sequel, but the Marvel film was not well received. Taylor has been reflecting upon that era of his career in a profile piece at Deadline (via Slash Film), recounting: “The version I had started off with had more childlike wonder; there was this imagery of children, which started the whole thing. There was a slightly more magical quality. There was weird stuff going on back on Earth because of the convergence that allowed for some of these magical realism things. And there were major plot differences that were inverted in the cutting room and with additional photography – people [such as Loki] who had died were not dead, people who had broken up were back together again. I think I would like my version.”
That’s quite a candid admission that the studio’s level of control over the film left him with little creative input, even as director.
Taylor would then go on to helm another big-budget franchise sequel, 2015’s critical flop, Terminator: Genisys, even though those around him read the script and warned him not to do it.
As Taylor puts it: ‘“All the voices in my head, and all the ones around me, were saying I should do it because who didn’t love the first two films? I thought we would go in and fix the script and everything could be great.”
When the script wasn’t improved and the film failed to do well with audiences and critics alike, Taylor remembers having to shift his outlook towards studio films: ‘“I had lost the will to make movies. I lost the will to live as a director. I’m not blaming any person for that. The process was not good for me. So I came out of it having to rediscover the joy of filmmaking.”
Taylor certainly seems to have rediscovered that joy with the upcoming The Many Saints Of Newark, the prequel film based on The Sopranos, which is due to release on September 24th. And for now at least, it seems like he’ll be staying away from the big franchise sequels after a couple of bruising experiences.
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