When things go horribly and a director would love to scrub a film from their CV or alter it beyond recognition, they often want the world to know why. From the director who tried to replace his credit with "Humpty Dumpty" to the one who got so irritated he punched a wall and broke his hand, we take a look at some of the most chaotic stories behind directorial dissatisfaction.
1. Alfred Hitchcock – Rope (1948)
Set in a single apartment, taking place in real-time and shot in 10-minute takes, stitched together to give a more continuous impression, the film follows two young men as they attempt to commit and conceal the perfect murder. Hitchcock had been keen to duplicate the fluidity of Patrick Hamilton’s play, but the production was beset by technical troubles.
In the end, he was dismissive of his own efforts, telling Truffaut in 1962: “I undertook Rope as a stunt; that’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.” When Truffaut pointed out that it was, at the very least, a positive step in Hitch’s evolution as a filmmaker, but that perhaps there was a reason that classical cutting techniques have prevailed, Hitchcock agreed, concluding: “No doubt about it; films must be cut.”
2. George Lucas – Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)
Although the special effects (the work of Lucas’s self-created company Industrial Light & Magic) were groundbreaking, budgetary constraints meant they didn’t match the director’s vision. In 1977, following the film’s enormous success (it surpassed Jaws as the highest-grossing film ever), the director described it to Rolling Stone as only about “25 per cent of what I wanted it to be”, telling the Los Angeles Times the same year: “I expected more out of Star Wars than was humanly possible. I had this dream, and it’s only a shadow of [that] dream.”
In 1997, Lucas digitally remastered the film and its two sequels, adding four and a half minutes to the original – including updated effects, releasing it as Star Wars: The Special Edition. These revisions proved extremely controversial among fans, though Lucas was unrepentant. “The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there,” he told Associated Press in 2004, “This is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.”
3. David Lynch – Dune (1984)
The reception to the finished product was terrible, with the scale of the project, challenging story, outside interference, and desire to do justice to another visionary swallowing up Lynch’s own idiosyncrasy. If Herbert himself was said to be happy, the film bombed at the box office and was dubbed the “Heaven’s Gate of science fiction”.
In the documentary David Lynch: The Idea Dictates Everything, the director opened up further to fellow filmmaker Stuart Mabey: “I sold out, so it was a slow dying the death, and a terrible, terrible experience.” Dune became, for Lynch, a lesson learned – as the director told Mabey: “Never, ever do a film without final cut.”
4. Steven Soderbergh – The Underneath (1995)
In a 2014 interview for the Criterion Collection, the director spoke frankly about his miserable experience making the film. He described himself as “absent” during the shoot, and said: “It’s a very unpleasant feeling to know that, not be able to discuss that with anybody, and see everybody working so hard – the cast and the crew, to give you what you want every day, and you know this thing is just dead on arrival.”
When asked by Gilles Jacob whether he wanted to screen The Underneath at the Cannes Film Festival, he told him: “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever made” (apparently Jacob laughed). Nevertheless, Soderbergh does see it as an important part of his development as a director, saying, “I needed to bottom out in order to rebuild.”
5. Tony Kaye – American History X (1998)
Kaye told The Guardian in 2002 that the shoot itself “went smoothly”. His original cut of the film was a trim 95 minutes, which attracted a positive response from test screenings. Nevertheless, the studio insisted on changes, with Norton assisting Kaye in the editing room to his great irritation and Kaye, at one point, punching a wall and breaking his hand. The version that was ultimately released was significantly longer and, as Kaye puts it, “crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other’s arms”.
Despite its director’s interventions, the movie was a critical hit and secured Norton an Oscar nomination. Kaye was done in Hollywood, but he has mellowed over time. “I appreciate now that I was an immature idiot, and a complete egomaniac,” he said. “But I had passion.”
6. Noah Baumbach – Highball (2002)
Baumbach fell out with the film’s producer, Joel Castleberg, and Highball remained unfinished due to a lack of finances. However, in 2002, it was assembled for a DVD release without Baumbach’s consent, and Baumbach and his co-writers disowned it. Asked how he felt about it being out there for all to see, Baumbach said: “I feel about as much ownership of Highball as I do the Hi-8 videos I made the summers I was in college. But those aren't out on DVD.”
7. Mathieu Kassovitz – Babylon AD (2008)
Page Six claimed that the director and star clashed during filming, and Kassovitz told AMC a week before the film’s release that Fox interfered with the production throughout. “I'm very unhappy with the film," he said. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be... it was a terrible experience."
Kassovitz had fallen in love with the book’s geopolitical themes and its warnings for the future. However, the finished product failed to live up to his expectations, with the director branding it “pure violence and stupidity... like a bad episode of 24”. In 2011, the documentary F**king Kassovitz took audiences behind-the-scenes to shed more light on the film’s disastrous shoot.
8. Joss Whedon – Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Yet, in 2016, a year after the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Whedon told the Tribeca Film Festival that he had been “beaten down by the process” of making what turned out to be an overstuffed sequel. “I think that I did a disservice to the movie and the studio and to myself,” Whedon said. “The things about it that are wrong frustrate me enormously, and I had probably more of those than I had on the other movies I made,” concluding he had, “come off of it feeling like a miserable failure.”
Actor Mark Ruffalo, who was also in attendance, said that he pleaded with Whedon to return to the MCU afterwards, telling the audience: “I’ve been begging him, and he said: I’ll never do it again.” Somewhat scandalously, Whedon jumped ship to the rival DC Extended Universe a year later, where he took over on the post-production of 2017’s ill-fated Justice League.
9. Josh Trank – Fantastic Four (2015)
However, once shooting began, the word from the Fantastic Four set was worrying, with The Hollywood Reporter leaking claims from insiders in May 2015 that Trank was "erratic", with plans for him to helm an upcoming Star Wars film axed (Trank has said that he himself made the decision to quit the project).
The film tanked and, speaking about the aftermath, Trank told Polygon: “I felt dead inside,” explaining that the experience sent him into an existential spin. “I didn’t want to be a big filmmaker anymore. That’s all I ever wanted.” The director returned in 2020 with the misfire Capone, starring Tom Hardy as the titular gangster.
10. Tomas Alfredson – The Snowman (2017)
And yet, the resulting 2017 film is a sometimes silly, tonally off effort that left everybody wondering what on Earth had gone wrong. It certainly didn’t help that supporting star Val Kilmer was recovering from throat cancer and had to have his lines redubbed, which has a strange effect on his performance.
Alfredson returned with the Swedish franchise film Se upp för Jönssonligan in 2020, with a Rachel Weisz-led adaptation of Séance on a Wet Afternoon incoming.
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