1.Michael Bay was not a fan of his highly anticipated Transformers sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, calling the film "crap."
"When I look back at it, that was crap," Bay told Empire magazine. "The writers’ strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks."
2.David Lynch doesn't even like to discuss Dune, which he directed in 1984, because not having the last say on the film's final cut felt like "selling out."
Lynch shared in the documentary The Great Directors, "It wouldn’t be fair to say it was a total nightmare, but it was maybe 75% a nightmare."
3.Kevin Yagher took his dislike of Hellraiser: Bloodline to a whole other level, disowning the film and asking for his name to be removed and replaced with "Alan Smithee," the pseudonym used by many directors wishing to cut ties with a project.
Yagher initially submitted a 110-minute cut, which the studio asked to be completely reworked. He declined to participate and, in the end, an 85-minute project was chopped together and released.
Spielberg thought the overall tone of the movie was off. "It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific," he told Medium. "I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my personal feeling in Temple of Doom.”
5.David O. Russell also used a pseudonym rather than taking credit for Accidental Love, which was originally supposed to be a political comedy titled Nailed.
The feature, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel, was shot in 2008, but never finished production due to financial difficulties. However, in an effort to salvage the project, the film they had was sloppily cut together by producers and released in 2015.
6.Guillermo del Toro hated his experience directing Mimic, largely in part due to working with the Weinstein brothers. “My first American experience was almost my last because it was with the Weinsteins and Miramax," del Toro shared at the BFI London Film Festival.
However, despite disliking the casting and having complaints about the story, del Toro does stand by the film's visual aesthetic: "The movie is visually gorgeous and it has a couple of sequences I’m very proud of.”
7.Filming back-to-back big-budget films like Thor: The Dark World and Terminator: Genisys ended up being a massive collaborative undertaking for Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor, who says he "lost the will to live as a director" through the process.
“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," Taylor told Uproxx.
8.Tony Kaye notoriously butted heads with New Line Cinema and Edward Norton during post-production of American History X. The British director says he "went into a kind of mania" after learning which cut of the feature was being released.
Kaye publicly battled to make his own final cut of the feature, taking out 35 full-page advertisements in trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. He even brought a priest, a rabbi, and a Tibetan monk to a meeting with a studio executive, seeking "help from God," to give him the extra time needed to finish the picture.
9.Noah Baumbach once called Highball a "foolish experiment" and a "mess" after the film was released straight-to-DVD without his approval.
The movie was allegedly shot over a six-day period on the extra film leftover from Baumbach's Mr. Jealousy and with the same cast and crew. The final product seems generally unfinished and gives directorial credit to the pseudonym "Ernie Fusco."
10.Steven Soderbergh felt absent while directing his film The Underneath, and described the final product as "totally sleepy."
Soderbergh admitted his mind was already focused on what his next project would be during filming. "It’s a very unpleasant feeling to know that, not being able to discuss that with anybody, and see everyone working so hard, cast and crew, to give you what you want every day," the director told Criterion. "And you know this thing is dead on arrival."
11.While director Josh Trank doesn't regret his 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four, he ultimately reflected that putting his personal take on the comic book classic was a risk, which didn't pay off.
"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,” Trank told Den of Geek.
12.Alien 3 is widely regarded as David Fincher's worst movie, and it seems the director himself agrees. "No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me," Fincher told the Guardian.
To be fair, the movie was Fincher's first feature as a director, and he seems to imply that a multitude of the problems were due to studio interference.
13.Although Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire was generally well received, Kubrick revealed the film went way over budget due to his inexperience and lack of a proper economic plan.
"It’s not a film I remember with any pride, except for the fact it was finished," Kubrick said about his first ever feature. Luckily, despite initial budgeting problems, Kubrick had since then paid back investors, which mostly consisted of his friends and family.
14.Dennis Hopper removed his director credit from Catchfire, demanding the use of the "Alan Smithee" pseudonym, after Vestron Pictures made substantial edits to his initial cut.
“This is not a film by Dennis Hopper. This is not directed by Dennis Hopper. This is directed by some idiots at Vestron," Hopper said. Ann Louise Bardach, the screenwriter of Backtrack, which was later released as Catchfire, tells a different story. "Working with Dennis was completely insane," Bardach shared with Hazlitt referring to the director's stressful work ethic and inability to compromise.
15.Alfred Hitchcock called Rope a "stunt," due to his experiential technique of stringing together a total of just 10 shots in an effort to make the story feel like it was based in real time.
"When I look back, of course, it’s quite nonsensical and unreal, because I was breaking all my own tradition of using film, in the cutting of film, to tell a story,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut.
16.And finally, director Kevin Reynolds claims Waterworld was "condemned before it was even finished." The film was a notoriously expensive undertaking and a huge box office flop.
Reynolds famously clashed with Kevin Costner, who the studio insisted star in the film. Before the film was released, Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly, "In the future Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself. That way he can always be working with his favorite actor and his favorite director."
