Sam Levinson is at it again. After Amy Seimetz walked away from The Idol due to “creative differences”—differences that resulted in Sam Levinson and Abel Tesfaye’s rape fantasy version of the series—a photographer has said that he did the same to her when it came to the hit series Euphoria.
In an interview with Punkt, a Hungarian publican, Petra Collins explained (in a now seemingly deleted excerpt) that Levinson reached out to her saying that he’d seen her work and that it had inspired him. He asked if she would like to direct a show that he had written based on them.
She accepted and moved to Los Angeles to work on it, but after five months Max fired her out of the blue saying that she was “too young.”
She explained that he reached out to her agency, “He said ‘I wrote a show based on your photos. Will you direct it?’ So I moved to LA and worked for HBO for about 5 months. I was like ‘I am directing the show.’ I created a whole world for it, I did the casting, whatever and the last minute HBO was like ‘We are not hiring you, because you are too young.’ And that was like ‘Fine, okay, thank you so much.'”
She then went on to say that she was naive and thought that HBO would abandon the project, but then later she saw an advertisement for Euphoria on a billboard. It left her feeling so shocked that her aesthetic had entered the mainstream—something she had spent her whole life building—and now it would have to be changed.
‘”I mean it happens to me so many times in my career, but not on a scale like that. It was so intense to me, because this is the aesthetic that I built all my life, and now I have to change it, ’cause it enters the mainstream and it’s been taken away from me. The worst thing was when people were unknowingly saying this show looks like your photos.'”
Max and Levinson have not yet responded to Collins’ claims, though I imagine it could read something like the statement that the channel released when Seimetz left The Idol which read, “The Idol’s creative team continues to build, refine, and evolve their vision for the show and they have aligned on a new creative direction. The production will be adjusting its cast and crew accordingly to best serve this new approach to the series.” A statement that addresses the claim—but also doesn’t really.
But then again, if he did release a statement, at least we’d get confirmation that he really is just a piece of trash who doesn’t care for women’s ideas and creativity.
(featured image: HBO)
