Lee Daniels Says Making ‘Empire’ For Fox Was “Absolutely The Worst Experience”

Lee Daniels‘ background in independent film – Monster’s Ball, Precious – once had him wondering what it would be like to work for a studio, a curiosity that was finally satisfied when he made Empire for Fox.

Or maybe satisfied is the wrong word.

“Horrible. Absolutely the worst experience. Horrible!” the director-producer says in a new interview with The Film Stage. “But guess what? F*cking that money, money, money! I was able to put my kids through college and shit. So that in itself was worth it.”

Daniels, whose new Netflix horror movie The Deliverance stars Andra Day, Glenn Close, Aunjanue Ellis and Mo’Nique, said in the interview, “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. I wanted to know what that experience was like.”

“I only did Empire just so I could see what that experience was like,” he said.

While his experience on The Deliverance with Netflix seems to have proceeded much more smoothly, Daniels said the streamer’s execs did have suggestions.

“I have final cut at Netflix because otherwise I wasn’t interested in doing the film,” he said. “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 goes on to say that his favorite movies were character-based horror films like “The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen.”

Ultimately, Daniels 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.”