Rupert Wyatt Reveals His Reasons for Leaving HALO Series

Fans of the Halo video games will be treated to a TV show eventually, after a bumpy ride. Rupert Wyatt was set to helm the series, but then he left the project in December. Well, he’s recently expounded his reasoning for leaving the project.

“I got involved, I knew very little about Halo—same as I knew very little about Planet of the Apes when I got involved—and I kind of steeped myself in the mythology and began to realize how much incredible literature there was and the depth of the storytelling, and it all stacked up for me. There was an incredible foundation for the storytelling, so it was gangbusters. I was super excited. In short, I think if I had come at it from an earlier perspective from the building of it then perhaps it would have gone differently, but as a director of a TV show it’s quite hard to sort of become a creative architect of a show. I think in a way I was never gonna be that, and that’s fine because there are really many talented people involved in that show who are doing that job.

So it became clear that there was gonna be more time needed, I’m talking some months if not years, to align—as you probably know it’s massively ambitious, so the budget for that really needs to align with the scripts. We were still kind of working on that, but it ultimately wasn’t under my watch to be able to find that alignment. So there was a choice made by Showtime which was essentially to push things, and if I had been perhaps been the showrunner then I would have stayed on that journey for two or three years, but as a director of a finite number of episodes, there’s other things I really wanna do. So I was very sad to leave, but basically it wasn’t within the framework that I originally signed up for.”

It sounds like the problem was two-fold. First, it would’ve been too much of a time sucker for him and would’ve prevented him from working on other projects.

Second, it sounded like once he got into the story and the mythology, he wished that he had more creative control over the series that wasn’t afforded him.

I can’t say I blame him for his decision, and I’m intrigued by what Otto Bathurst may bring to the series which will premiere on Showtime whenever they make it.

Via: Collider