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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
Empire creator Lee Daniels has reflected on the years he spent making the hit six-season drama calling it the “worst experience.”
Led by Terrence Howard, Taraji P Henson and Jussie Smollett, the Emmy-nominated Fox series co-created by Daniels and actor Danny Strong revolved around the CEO of a successful entertainment empire who learns he’s dying and must decide which son will take over the business.
Speaking in a new interview with The Film Stage about his latest project, The Deliverance, Daniels, 64, who is predominantly an independent film director, revealed that he only did Empire to “check a box.”
“I don’t like staying in the same lane just as a creative. When I got into television, I really just wanted to be able to answer to suits,” the Precious director said. “I wanted to know what that experience was like. All of my friends, they get notes and s***.
“And I’m like, ‘What is that like?!’ You know what I mean? Because every film of mine had been independent. All of my s*** is independent,” he continued.
“It was so hard. It was really hard,” Daniels recalled of finally working with a studio. “Horrible. Absolutely the worst experience. Horrible!
“But guess what? F***ing that money, money, money! I was able to put my kids through college and s***. So that in itself was worth it,” he said, admitting that he only did Empire to see “what that experience was like.”
Empire is a critically acclaimed show that went on to earn eight Emmy nominations across its five-year run from 2015 to 2020.
Despite Daniels’ poor experience working with a studio, it doesn’t seem to have deterred him from doing so again, as he’s teamed up with Netflix on his newest movie, The Deliverance.
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“I have final cut at Netflix because otherwise I wasn’t interested in doing the film,” he explained. “But they wanted – ‘they’ meaning Netflix – wanted jump scares every second. And I did not know how to do that. And I said, ‘Listen, man, I can’t do this. I don’t know how… it does not compute.’”
He eventually compromised, deciding: “Okay, let me just give them what they want a little bit because it’s a Lee Daniels film, but it’s also a Netflix film.”
The Deliverance is an exorcism film based on a real-life horror story about the experiences of Latoya Ammons and her family who claimed they were haunted by a demonic presence and swarms of unkillable black flies after moving into a rental house in Gary, Indiana in 2011.
Starring Andra Day, Glenn Close, Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin and Mo’Nique, the adaptation, which is streaming now on Netflix, has not been a hit with critics.
It currently has a critics rating of 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with HuffPost calling it “a mess of a movie” and IGN stating that it’s “neither scary nor thoughtful enough to leave a mark.”
