The Wizard of Oz spreekt al jaren tot de verbeelding van mensen en heeft al zoveel films en TV shows gekregen waar de karakters uit het boek centraal in stonden. Zo zal op 6 januari in de US de serie Emerald City beginnen en daar in zien we het bekende verhaal op een wat hippere manier. Om deze nieuwe show wat extra aandacht te geven had de website Collider een interview met de regisseur Tarsem Singh en daar van kan je hier onder een klein stukje lezen.

This was a show that was going to get made, and then it wasn't going to get made, and now, here we are.

SINGH: That's exactly right, and nobody will tell me if they had directors or not. Truly, there was no amount of money that would have made this possible, if they were just going to have me make the pilot. It would have been 85% of the cost, with the kind of sets we were talking about. It had to be for everything. But, I don't know who was involved before.

You brought a reimagined version of a fairytale to life with Mirror Mirror, and here you are doing that again with Emerald City. Is it more daunting to re-tell a classic story within the confines of a movie, or to fill up 10 hours of story for a full season?

SINGH: For me, the thing of it is that, if I was aware of what this means to most people, it might have been daunting. You either try to find a different take, or you bring somebody in like me, where the ingredients are different and my background is different. The reason it's going to taste different is because you've got an Indian guy telling a quintessentially white tale to a Western audience. It just will be different, by definition, even if I was trying to conform, and I wasn't trying to conform. I hadn't seen The Wizard of Oz until three years ago. The reason I saw it was because everybody kept telling me that The Fall was like that. I had seen bits of it and knew what it was about, but when I saw it, I thought it was the biggest stage movie you could make. What I wanted to do was the complete opposite and have it be completely grounded, like a real place, and that's what they were looking for. It's quintessentially a Western tale that everyone is familiar with, but I wasn't, so there wasn't any intimidation. Now, when I see people going, "I hope he doesn't corrupt the movie," I realize that people hold it as sacred. If I knew that, I might have been worried, but I didn't know that, at all.