Alan Taylor: Thor: Dark World experience was 'particularly wrenching'

Terminator Genisys isn’t winning over film critics just yet, but its Emmy-winning director, Alan Taylor—a stalwart TV veteran whose credits include Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and The Sopranos—gets points for speaking his mind about his previous blockbuster experience.

In a Q&A with Uproxx, Taylor described his unpleasant experience collaborating with Marvel on 2013’s Thor: The Dark World. “I’ve learned that you don’t make a $170 million movie with someone else’s money, and not have to collaborate a lot,” he said. “The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post it turned into a different movie. So, that is something I hope never to repeat and don’t wish upon anybody else.”

The Thor sequel, which earned $645 million worldwide (about $200 million more than the first movie), was nonetheless a pre-production geyser of director switcheroos and creative differences. Both original Thor helmer Kenneth Branagh and Game of Thrones’ Brian Kirk passed on the project after protracted negotiations, and in 2011 Marvel announced Patty Jenkins (2003’s Oscar-winning Monster) as the film’s director, the first woman to direct a superhero epic. She quit two months later and Taylor was hired within days of her exit.

Sufficed to say, he hasn’t been invited back—at least not yet—to direct the third in the series, Thor: Ragnarok, scheduled for release in 2017. At a recent press event to promote Ant-Man, Marvel president Kevin Feige commented, “Probably towards the end of the summer we would announce a filmmaker and a writer [for Ragnarok]. May be the same person, I don’t know, may be two different people.”

Meanwhile, Taylor had nothing but fond memories of his recent Terminator experience. “The story we started telling is essentially the story we finished and are bringing out into the world,” he told Uproxx.

For more from Taylor, head to Uproxx.