Lee Daniels Clarifies Statement About Empire Being His ‘Worst Experience’: ‘That’s So Not True’

Lee Daniels

Lee Daniels Clarifies Statement About Empire Being His ‘Worst Experience’: ‘That’s So Not True’

Lee Daniels is setting the record straight after stating that Empire was his “worst experience.” During a recent interview, the 64-year-old director explained, “That’s so not true.”

He added, “What I meant was the worst because all of my films have been independently financed. It was the first time I was taking notes from anybody…no one gave me notes to do anything.”

Lee Daniels, who is promoting his latest Netflix film Deliverance pointed out that it’s “normal” for a studio to have notes for a showrunner, however, the experience was still “jarring.”

Lee Daniels

He continued, “I think that I had a great experience with them and they really, they understood that things had to change, and then also, you know, you can’t, it was the first time like … You can’t tell me how to be Black. Stop with the insanity. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And so it was a first for all of us and it was challenging for me and it was a nightmare in the beginning, but then it was great.”

Another factor, Lee Daniels said, was the fact that ‘Empire’ was the first of its kind for Blacks in Hollywood.

“I think that things really changed. You have to understand, when ‘Empire’ was around, there weren’t any Black writers in any rooms. There weren’t any Black directors on television. There wasn’t ‘Black Panther,’ there wasn’t ‘Insecure,’ there wasn’t any of that,” said Daniels, who co-created the Fox series with #DannyStrong. “You know, and so we were learning as we were growing and there were all these rules and Black people were not able to be employed creatively because the system was not for us, so it was a bit of a struggle.”

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