It's been a while since famed director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption,Romantic comedy Archives The Green Mile) was suddenly and unexpectedly canned as showrunner of The Walking Deadwhile in the middle of filming the show's second season in the summer of 2011.

But now it's a whole lot more clear why.

A lawsuit was brought by Darabont in 2013 claiming, among other things, AMC purposely kept the show's licensing fees low which then lowered the profits that would be doled out to those, like Darabont, who worked on the show. But the attention Thursday was on expletive-filled emails that Darabont wrote, part of a large document cache that was made public.

The four emails were released by AMC, and they paint Darabont as a volatile figure whose firing was justified. The messages were sent in June and July of 2011, while filming of Season 2 of TWD was taking place down in Georgia (when budget cuts forced the show to spend an interminable amount of time on Herschel's farm).

In the first email, dated July 21, 2010, Darabont declares, "There IS no writers room... I am the writers room. The fucking lazy assholes who were supposedly going to be my showrunners threw the responsibility on me after wasting five months of my time."

Some of the strongest words were reserved for them, of whom Darabont said, after they handed in what he considered a terrible script, "I'd have not only fired [them]... I'd have hunted them down and fucking killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes."

In the next email, dated June 13, 2011, Darabont laments poor camera work in a message sent to director Gwyneth Horder-Payton; producers Gale Anne Hurd, Tom Luse, and Denise Huth; cinematographer Daivd Boyd; and editor Hunter Via.

In it, Darabont proclaims, "And the operators MUST be told to HOLD THE FUCKING SHOT! Goddamn it, I am sick and tired of seeing these assholes pan away and/or re-size before the shot even has a chance to work."

Other Darabont quotes include:

• "WTF is going on in these takes?"

• "Utterly demented and unusable shit."

• "Ray Charles could operate better."

And then he closes with this rant that should go down in history of one of the all-time great boss rants:

YOU NEED TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE MOTHERFUCKING SCRIPT! I EVEN CHOOSE MY GODDAMN COMMAS FOR A REASON! WHAY AM I WORKING SO FUCKING HARD IF YOU'RE SHOOTING EVERYTHING SOME OTHER WAY THAT DOESN'T WORK?

*Low whistle

Impressive.

But, wait, there's more.

In an email sent the following day, June 14, to Hurd, Huth, Boyd, Via, Hroder-Payton, Luse, assistant director Jeffrey January, and special effects wiz Greg Nicotero, Darabont warns of being in "a state of absolute boiling rage right now."

Then he lets loose, saying:

Congratulations, you all accomplished what I thought was impossible. You've Turned me into a raging asshole. Thanks a lot, you fuckers.

Everybody, especially our directors, better waked the fuck up and pay attention. Or I will start killing people and throwing bodies out the door."

The rest of the email is a tirade, again, about poor shooting of scenes in the episode.

This time, his epic rant includes, "Fuck you all for giving me chest pains because of the staggering fucking incompetence" etc etc etc.

The next day's email, this time to just Huth, Hurd, Luse, Via, and Boyd, was much calmer but still with plenty of ire directed at director Horder-Payton, of whom Darabont says, "I'm pretty sure Gwyneth just fucked my chances to direct 213 [what was to be the season finale]" because of extra work caused by what Darabont considered poor work on the the first episode of that season.

He closes: "I honestly think we should recommend to Gwyneth that she go get a brain scan and see if she'd had a problem."

Ice cold.

For his part, Darabont defended his behavior in an affidavit that was part of the large document release related to the lawsuit.

He said the emails were written, "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.”

“Each of these emails was sent because a ‘professional’ showed up whose laziness, indifference, or incompetence threatened to sink the ship of production and added unfair and unnecessary burden to their colleagues in the cast and crew. 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. As for the enormous problems they describe, I stand by these emails to the last detail.”

The lawsuit remains ongoing.

Meanwhile, the eighth season of The Walking Deadhits TV screens this fall.