Random Directors Who Hated Their Own Movies (15 items)

• 

  (#14) Arthur Hiller - An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

  When Arthur Hill set out to film an acerbic take down of the film industry, he probably didn't realize that his life would become an ironic extension of the parody he was committing to film. After seeing the final cut of his film about a director whose film is taken from him by the studio, he had his name struck from the credits, but it was too late. The film bombed and essentially killed the career of plenty of people involved with it. 
• 

  (#6) Woody Allen - Annie Hall

  Annie Hall is considered by cinephiles not only one of Woody Allen's best films, but a touchstone for romantic comedies. Unfortunately, the director doesn't believe this to be true. His early idea for the film was titled Anhedonia and was much more ambitious, with the romance as just a subplot. At a 2012 press conference to promote From Rome With Love Allen insisted that Annie Hall fell short of his much more experimental vision. Even though it did win the Oscar for Best Picture.
• 

  (#8) Joel Schumacher - Batman & Robin

  Joel Schumacher basically wrecked the Batman franchise for about a decade with his abysmal Batman & Robin, a sequel to slightly less awful but still really bad Batman Forever. The director has gone on record to apologize for making a miserable film, even going so far as to say that he wanted to make a dark and gritty Batman: Year One, but Warner Bros. vetoed him. Suuuure you did Joel, sure you did. 
• 

  (#7) David Lynch - Dune

  David Lynch is a weirdo cinematic visionary, so it makes sense that the one film in his oeuvre that he distances himself from is Dune, the adaptation of Frank Herbert's literary sic-fi classic.Lynch rarely speaks about the film, but he has mentioned that he wasn't given final cut of the film, an early mainstream effort from a notorious oddball. His lack of creative control on Dune probably has something to do with its expulsion from his canon. When the studio cobbled together a extra hour of cut footage to assemble an 'extended cut,' Lynch asked that they change his screenwriting credit to the pseudonym "Judas Booth" - an amalgam of Judas Iscariot and John Wilkes Booth - to signify his feelings towards what he believed was the studio's 'betrayal.'
• 

  (#11) Stanley Kubrick - Fear and Desire

  Stanley Kubrick may have dismissed his feature directorial debut as “a bumbling amateur film exercise,” but that hasn't kept audiences from wanting to see it. After years of the film coming up MIA and rumors that Kubrick destroyed all the prints, the film finally saw the light of day via Turner Classic Movies in 2011, well over a decade after Kubrick's death.
  
• 

  (#4) Tony Kaye - American History X

  The making of American History X has more twists and turns that your average Hollywood film. Although it began as Kaye's first directorial feature, after he began to cut the film down to a bare-bones 87 minutes, the film's producers suggested that he work with the film's star, Edward Norton, to beef the film back up. Kaye balked, then he brought in a priest, a rabbi, and a Tibetan monk in to the office of New Line’s president, elaborately asking for an extension on editing his cut of the film. The president said no, that they were going to release the version he and Norton put together. After the film was released, Kaye tried to get his name scratched from the film, but the Directors Guild said no dice. 

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking