“I Can’t Say I’d Recommend It To Anyone” — 15 Directors Who Cringed At Their Own Movies, And 6 Who Disowned Them Entirely

Making a film is no mean feat. There’s budgeting, studio preferences, and lots of big personalities to consider before you can even start to think about stuff like line delivery, edits, and cinematography. Not all of this is as much in the director’s control as lots of us think, either — so it’s no wonder not all of them love every second of their creations. Here are 21 who either cringed at, or full-on disowned, their movies:

I think it’s fair to say that David Fincher isn’t a fan of Alien 3.

20th Century Studios

The script of the movie wasn’t complete by the time they started filming — in fact, the whole thing was allegedly shoved together in five weeks. “I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me,” Fincher said of the movie in 2009.

Audiences loved Avengers: Age of Ultron. But its director Joss Whedon? Yeah, not so much.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Following up from the blockbuster first Avengers movie was no easy feat, so it’s no wonder its director felt the pressure. Though he said he was “proud” of the movie overall, he admitted, “There were things that did not meet my expectations, of myself… And then I was so beaten down by the process, some of that was conflicting with Marvel, which is, inevitable. But a lot of it was about my own work.”

He added that while he was grateful for the chance to make a movie like that, “The things about [Age of Ultron] that are wrong frustrate me enormously and I had probably more of those than I have on the other movies I’ve made.” Joss Whedon refused to make any more Marvel movies after that one.

Joel Schumacher was so bothered by how Batman & Robin came out, he straight-up apologised to the public for making it.

Warner Bros.

Speaking to Vice on the movie’s 20th birthday, he said, “Look, I apologise. I want to apologise to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that.” Chris O’Donnell and George Clooney publicly slated the movie too — in the same interview, Schumacher said, “after Batman & Robin, I was scum. It was like I had murdered a baby.”

Steven Spielberg said Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would “not go down in my pantheon as one of my prouder moments,” even calling Last Crusade an “an apology” for the movie.

Paramount Pictures / Paramount Home Entertainment

He told The Sun Sentinel, “I wasn’t happy with Temple of Doom at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom. The danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone.”

However, it’s not all bad news. While he revealed in a documentary that “Temple of Doom is my least favourite of the [Indiana Jones] trilogy,” he added, “I look back and I say, ‘Well the greatest thing that I got out of that was I met Kate Capshaw.’ We married years later and that to me was the reason I was fated to make Temple of Doom.”

David Lynch regrets filming Dune, saying, “I started selling out on Dune.”

Universal Pictures

The director doesn’t even like talking about the film now, he says adding “I probably shouldn’t have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in.” In a documentary, he said, “It wouldn’t be fair to say it was a total nightmare, but it was maybe 75% a nightmare.”

Josh Trank said he originally had a very different vision of Fantastic Four to what eventually hit the screens; though he did also say, “I don’t regret it because it happened and it led me to where I am.”

20th Century Studios

After the movie came out, the director — who claims he had his his original vision chopped and changed by the studio — Tweeted, then swiftly deleted, “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

Speaking to Den of Geek, he also said that putting his spin on the classic was a mistake. “It was an expensive miscalculation, it was an expensive mistake that I made, but I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that we all as an industry haven’t learned something from that to some degree,” he shared.

Noah Baumbach (he of Barbie fame) said his second film, Highball, was “too ambitious.” When the film was released on DVD against his wishes, he asked for his name to be scrubbed completely from the project.

Shoreline Entertainment / Kathy Morgan International

“We didn’t have enough time, we didn’t finish it, it didn’t look good, it was just a whole… mess,” he said of the movie, which he says was made in six days. “We couldn’t get it done, and I had a falling out with the producer. He abandoned it, and I had no money to finish it, to go back and maybe get two more days or something,” he added.

Alan Taylor seems not to like how Thor: The Dark World came out.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

“The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post it turned into a different movie,” he said of the film. “So, that is something I hope never to repeat and don’t wish upon anybody else.”

In another interview, he said his version had “more childlike wonder” and “a slightly more magical quality.” He added, “I think I would like my version.”

Michael Bay didn’t mince his words when speaking of his Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie. “That was crap,” he said.

Paramount Pictures / DreamWorks Pictures / FilmFlex

“The writers’ strike was coming hard and fast,” he explained in a 2011 interview. “It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks. I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was. It’s a BS way to make a movie.”

10.

Stanley Kubrick thought he could have done better with Fear and Desire; in fact, it was reported that he tried to destroy both the original negative prints of the film and its subsequent prints.

Joseph Burstyn / Stanley Kubrick

He called the movie “far from inspired,” “a serious effort, ineptly done,” “a presumptuous failure,” and “not a film I remember with any pride, except for the fact it was finished.” When the copyright of the film lapsed and a cinema attempted to show a restored film, Kubrick urged Warner Bros to write a release saying it was “written by a failed poet, crewed by a few friends, and a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious… a bumbling amateur film exercise.”

11.

Kevin Reynolds said Waterworlds was “condemned before it was even finished.”

Universal Pictures

Though the director said, “I don’t think it’s any worse or any better than any other picture in its genre. It’s not awful.” he also told Entertainment Weekly that “In the future [the movie’s star Kevin] Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself. That way he can always be working with his favourite actor and his favourite director.”

12.

Jerry Lewis was so ashamed of his movie The Day the Clown Cried, he refused to release it at all.

Stf / AFP via Getty Images

Though he doesn’t comment on the movie often, Lewis said “I was ashamed of the work and I was grateful I had the power to contain it all and never let anyone see it” in 2013, adding “It could have been wonderful but I slipped up — I didn’t quite get it.”

In 1992, he said, “This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.”

He gave a copy of his movie to the Library of Congress, who agreed not to show it ’til… oh, look at that, June 2024. However, the Library seems reluctant, or unable, to screen it.

13.

Dennis Hopper used the pseudonym Alan Smithee, an industry in-joke which directors use to disown films they’re ashamed of, in the credits for Catchfire.

Vestron Pictures

“I mean, I directed that movie. What can I say, every foot of film I directed, but I didn’t edit it and the editing of a film is directing a film,” he said. “I mean, a person can take your footage, when I sometimes have 40-45 hours of film, they can make any movie they want, that doesn’t make it a Dennis Hopper film. That doesn’t make it mean that it’s directed by Dennis Hopper… whatever was left suddenly destroyed the meaning of the movie.”

He later put his name on a 1992 director’s cut with an alternate ending.

14.

Kevin Yagher also went the Alan Smithee route, disowning Hellraiser: Bloodline.

Miramax / Dimension Films

His original 110-minute cut was cropped to 85 minutes by the studio after he refused to chop and change his original work. He went with the distancing director name of shame in the credits of the movie.

16.

Mathieu Kassovitz called Babylon AD “pure violence and stupidity.”

20th Century Studios / StudioCanal

He claims 15 full minutes were chopped from the movie, which “is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet.” Originally, he says, “All the action scenes had a goal: they were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters… instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24.”

17.

David O. Russell had his name scrubbed from Accidental Love.

Alchemy

The catastrophic movie was originally named Nailed. Although Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal were cast for the, er, political rom-com, it ended up collapsing due to pay issues; it was shut down 14 times before being abandoned. But when O. Russell got famous for movies like The Fighter, the studio wanted to release it. It came out under a different name (Accidental Love), and the director’s name was changed to Stephen Greene, too.

18.

“I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone other than to look at in the context of someone’s career,” Stephen Soderbergh said of The Underneath.

Gramercy Pictures

“15 seconds in, I know we’re in trouble because of how f***ing long it takes to get through those opening credits. That’s just an indication of what’s wrong with this thing: it’s just totally sleepy,” he said of the film he also called “dead on arrival.”

19.

Alfred Hitchcock called Rope “nonsensical” and a “stunt.”

Warner Bros. / Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures / United Artists

The movie, which used only 10 shots stitched together to create a real-time feel, was “nonsensical and unreal, because I was breaking all my own tradition of using film, in the cutting of film, to tell a story,” the director says.

20.

Ironically enough, a film about Alan Smithee became an Alan Smithee film.

Hollywood Pictures / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Remember Alan Smithee who we were talking about earlier — an imaginary “director” real directors use to distance themselves from a project? Well, when Arthur Hiller got to work on An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, he focused on a fictional director called Alan Smithee whose name caused problems when creating movies. But when that film got recut by the studio in a way Hiller didn’t like, he thought he’d distance himself from it — using the infamous name in his credits instead of his own.

21.

Tomas Alfredson seems to be little dissatisfied with The Snowman.

Universal Pictures

Claiming 10-15% of the script wasn’t filmed, Alfredson said of the slated film, “We didn’t get the whole story with us and when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing. It’s like when you’re making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don’t see the whole picture.” He added, “Our shoot time in Norway was way too short.”

Got any others to add, or just have thoughts on the above? LEt us know in the comments below!