Having differences with Nic Pizzolatto is disheartening: Cary

Filmmaker Cary Fukunaga has opened up about the "disheartening" experience he had when he worked on HBO series 'True Detective'.

Fukunaga served as the director for all the eight episodes of the critically-acclaimed first season that featured Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in the lead.

But despite winning an Emmy for outstanding directing for the show, Fukunaga chose not to return for the second season, which was universally panned.

"The show was presented to me in the way we pitched it around town as an independent film made into television. The writer and director are a team.

"Over the course of the project, Nic kept positioning himself as if he was my boss and I was like, ' But you're not my boss. We're partners. We collaborate'," Fukunaga revealed.

During the post-production, he said Pizzolatto was empowered by the HBO executives that made their partnership quite unfair.

"By the time they got to post-production, people like (former HBO programming president) Michael Lombardo were giving Nic more power. It was disheartening because it didn't feel like the partnership was fair," he added.

Talking about the creative differences he had with the creator, Fukunaga said he differed with Pizzolatto on the "tone and taste" of the show.

"Nic is a really good writer, but I do think he needs to be edited down. It becomes too much about the writing and not enough about the momentum of the story.

"My struggle with him was to take some of these long dialogue scenes and put some air into them. We differed on tone and taste," he added.

During the interview, Fukunaga also explained the reasons why he exited the film adaptation of celebrated author Stephen King's 'It' novel series.

"I was on that for four or five years with Warners and then it got moved to New Line, right before we were about to go into production. I think New Line's view of what they wanted and my view of what I wanted were very different.