Ryan Murphy Reveals the Origin of Feud

While at the Television Critics Association winter previews to promote his upcoming FX series Feud, Ryan Murphy sat down with TVGuide.com to talk about his groundbreaking Half Foundation and how he came up with the idea for his new show.

"Last year in 2016 I created a foundation in my company called the Half foundation," Murphy told us. "From that moment forward and onward, 50 percent of the directorial slots in my television world will always be women."

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"So in doing that I was talking to a lot of women in the business about what can I do better, what is your experience, tell me what you're feeling, tell me what you think has been an injustice done to you," he continued. "So I was getting a lot of very emotional, moving stories. Also happening at the same time was my interest in doing a show about exploring a sort of two-character piece, battling against each other. And I owned a script called Best Actress that was a Blacklist script that I bought in 2009."

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Murphy explained Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon were attached to the movie, but he was never able to "crack it" until he had a lightbulb moment:

"I thought, well maybe I can do this project sort of as an eight-hour movie, talking about the issues that I'm interested in that are very modern," he explained. "So everything came together right away and I called John Landgraf [the President of FX] thinking this would be a very hard sell and 30 minutes into my pitch he said, 'Sold!' so I kind of lucked out."

Feud premieres Mar. 5 at 10/9c on FX.