Lee Daniels Recalls “Horrible” Experience Shooting ‘Empire’ For Fox

Lee Daniels’ background — and success — as an independent filmmaker led to the director being offered “bigger” opportunities, like his 2015 Fox hit, Empire , starring Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard. In a new interview, however, Daniels recalls his “horrible” time producing the series that started off a hit, but faded in popularity by the end of season two, wrapping for good in 2020.

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“Horrible. Absolutely the worst experience. Horrible!,” he said of his experience working on the musical dramedy during a chat with The Film Stage . Even so, there was a silver lining for the director.

“But guess what? F**king that money, money, money ! I was able to put my kids through college and sh*t. So that in itself was worth it,” he confessed of the bittersweet experience.

Daniels discussed his less-than-stellar time with Fox after sharing that he never experienced executive pressure as an indie filmmaker before working for the studio. With new Netflix film The Deliverance, he required the same level of freedom, finding place for compromise with the popular streamer and their demands.

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“I have final cut at Netflix because otherwise I wasn’t interested in doing the film,” he revealed. 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.’  My favorite movies were The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen .”

The film, released Aug. 30, has already become water cooler banter thanks to star Glenn Close’s portrayal of a weave-sewing white women moving in with her bi-racial daughter and grandchildren. For Lee, the character represents a part of the Black community, receiving pushback over his claim that, “Every Black person knows an Alberta. She’s part of the fabric of our community, but we’ve never seen her on screen before.”

“Black people are obsessed with white women who act like stereotypical black women, but hate actual black women who act and sound like this. Lee Daniels isn’t exempt,” offered one observer of his comments on X, with another adding , “Truthfully we didn’t even need ‘an Alberta’ cause Latoya was black. FULLY black. So to throw ‘fabric of our community’ on it is truly asking to f**k the vibe up…. haven’t seen one damn white account talking about this movie, and here you go talmbout some ‘fabric of the community.’” Check out more reactions below.

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