While speaking at the Reykjavik International Film Festival, the eXistenZ director reminisced about inviting HBO to talk to the hand. “Last year I was approached to direct the first episode of the second season of True Detective,” said Cronenberg. “I considered it but I thought that the script was bad, so I didn’t do it.” (Note the mind’s natural inclination to transpose the words “bad” and “so” when reading the previous sentence.)
He elaborated the difference between big- and small-screen directorial duties, citing a television director’s lack of freedom and consistent workload: “In TV, the director is just a traffic cop, but on the other hand, it is work and there’s a lot of it.” That juxtaposition also doubles as an encapsulation of True Detective’s uninspired second-season plotting, which pits low-level police fuck-ups against an unceasing labyrinth of depressing, banal chores.
Season two was largely panned by naysayers, with some exceptions. It’s not clear how Pizzolatto will shift gears again for a third season, or if he even wants to return. We already know that Fukunaga can’t be charmed back into the director’s seat. Perhaps if Pizzolatto crafts a more coherent story he can lure Cronenberg back. We recommend that old chestnut about a simple beat cop who gets lured into a hallucinatory underworld of Kafkaesque plots, unreliable allies, and explosive outbursts of sexualized body horror.
