As Frank Darabont’s whopping $280 million lawsuit against AMC rages on, some shocking emails have come to light that the former Walking Dead showrunner sent to his co-workers.
Written during the tempestuous production of the hit series’ first two seasons, the emails show how much Darabont was pushed to the edge due to his frustration with the direction that the show was being taken in. The most shocking quote comes from a message to the directors, telling them to follow his script “or I will start killing people and throwing bodies out the door.”
The emails were used in evidence in the network’s defense against Darabont’s claims that he was unfairly dismissed midway through season 2 and never received his rightful licensing fees. Other emails include a rant against two members of his writing team who he felt delivered subpar scripts. Darabont referred to the writers as “f*cking lazy assholes” and “overpaid con artists.”
He went on to say:
“If it were up to me, I’d have not only fired [them], I’d have hunted down and f*cking killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes… I told those assholes at least half a dozen times. Why don’t they listen when I TELL them the way to do it? … [I]t’s in one ear and out the other… It’s almost as if they’re intentionally telling me to f*ck myself.”
Other tirades include an attack on the camera operators because of, according to Darabont, an over-usage of shaky-cam:
“You MUST calm down the camera operating. This is turning out WAY more shaky-cam than I want. When I said please limit the handheld, it wasn’t a random suggestion… And the operators MUST be told to HOLD THE FUCKING SHOT! … Tell these operators that if they cannot provide us footage that works, we need to replace them with people who can. What the f*ck are we paying them for? Ray Charles could operate better.”
Darabont – who’s most well known for directing The Shawshank Redemption – has released a statement explaining the context of these emails, claiming that they were composed during “an intense and stressful two-year period” in which he fought to protect his show from “harm.”
“Each of these emails must be considered in context. They were sent during an intense and stressful two-year period of work during which I was fighting like a mother lion to protect the show from harm — not only on my own behalf, but ironically also on behalf of AMC.
“Each of these emails was sent because a ‘professional’ showed up whose laziness, indifference, or incompetence threatened to sink the ship. My tone was the result of the stress and magnitude of this extraordinary crisis. The language and hyperbole of my emails were harsh, but so were the circumstances.”
Nowadays, The Walking Dead is helmed by Scott M. Gimple, and its eighth season is set to air at some point later this year.