As a directors’ filmography grows and we look back on their most prominent and classic works, a consensus emerges about what films are their best, what are their worse, etc. While many will constantly debate whether Raging Bull is better than Goodfellas, if Vertigo is Hitchcock’s best film, if Christopher Nolan ever bettered Memento, as well as what films are “underrated” or “overrated,” people can mostly agree on what are the definitive works of a specific director. But what do directors think of their own works?
It’s sometimes surprising to discover that some directors aren’t huge fans of their most acclaimed and popular films. This article will look at the directors who were either apathetic or straight up hated their own films. It goes to show that in many cases, an artist’s toughest critic is themselves.
10. Woody Allen – Annie Hall, Manhattan & Hannah And Her Sisters
The late seventies were a turning point for writer/director/actor Woody Allen, where his work shifted from the farcical films such as Love & Death (1972), towards the more mature works like Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979). Annie Hall, which won Allen Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars, as well as winning Best Picture, can be argued to be the film that defined the shape of Allen’s career over the last thirty plus years. Which makes it surprising that Allen himself was, and still is disappointed in the film. This is because the final product is very different from Allen’s original vision. At a press conference last year while promoting his latest film, To Rome With Love, he commented on how he originally imagined the film:
“The film was supposed to be what happens in a guy’s mind, and you were supposed to see a stream of consciousness that was mine, and I did the film and it was completely incoherent. Nobody understood anything that went on. The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about. That was one small part of another big canvas that I had. In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton, and that relationship…”
Allen wanted Annie Hall to be even more experimental than what ended up on screen, though one still can see ways in which Allen is experimenting with narrative structure- the subtitles during the conversation with Alvy and Annie, telling us what they really think, the split screen therapy session, the animated sequence- in the finished film.
Allen also was not a fan of Manhattan, despite it now being considered one of his finest, if not best, films. Allen so strongly disliked this film that he told United Artists he’d direct another film for them, for free, if they shelved the film.
1986′s Hannah and Her Sisters is another film he considers a disappointment. Like Annie Hall, he views it as a compromised vision:
“Hannah and Her Sisters was a big disappointment because I had to compromise my original intention tremendously to survive with the film.”
It is to be noted that Allen doesn’t consider his filmography to be one that will live on. But if Annie Hall and Manhattan don’t stand the test of time, then what chance does any other filmmaker have?
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5 Comments
You couldve put George Lucas on his Christmas special of Star Wars, but its not really a film.
Batman and Robin was awful… Franchise ruining bad… I dont think its in the running for all-time worse superhero film… Maybe all-time missed opertunity given the source material and the talent attached but I can think of much worse… Batman and Robin does have an audience…. Kids… It’s a live action superhero movie that kids will and do like…. I loved it when I was a kid and couldnt weed out bad acting, dialogue, or a stupid plotline…. It had action, Corny jokes, goofy set pieces that had a lot of vibrant colors and unique designs and it had a lot of cartoony batman characters and honestly it seemed like as awful as it was everyone involved was having fun doing it…. The movie is basically a cartoon…. There are many superhero movies that dont even have THAT going for them… Elektra omes to mind a bit… Ghost Rider and Hulk were really unpleasant Catwoman is probably the all-time worst though… There was nothing even creative about that flick… Then you got obvious scrubs like tank girl, the 80′s captain America, the 80′s punisher. Actually I think the Spirit is darkhorse for worst all-time and missed opertunity awards, Big talent, big budget and it was just bland, forgettable and stupid all at once….
I wont throw Daredevil in the category with those films though as some would guess… Daredevil actually did moderate with critics upon release and did well at the box office and the directors cut has made for a huge Cult following and honestly… It has some cringe-worthy moments but it also has a few strong ones, especially the directors cut… Daredevil’s biggest reason for having a bad rep is the Gigli affect… It came out between Pearl Harbor, Jersey Girl, Gigli and surviving christmas and as a result it came cool to hate Affleck but Daredevil got cast in a really bad light for coming out in that timeline.
Another notable case would be Danny Cannon and ‘Judge Dredd’… Cannon was only 26 when he signed on to make an $80m blockbuster, and his whole experience with Stallone was so disheartening he vowed never to work with a big A-List star ever again, and never has to date! It’s a shame that film turned out the way it did, William Wisher’s original treatment was a pretty decent slice of futuristic epicness – even if it wasn’t the Judge Dredd fim we would have wanted, given the choice – and Cannon (who signed on based on Wisher’s story) definitely had a vision for the film, unfortunately it’s star was an egotistical megalomaniac who siezed control of the film, and the producers couldn’t agree what kind of film they were making to begin with, both of which resulted in Cannon being squeezed and ultimately sidelined.
The whole debacle just proved that Americans should never have made a Judge Dredd movie in the first place, it’s just a cultural thing, and the recent adaptation (although too grim and nihilistic in tone, and which should have had considerably more of the source comic’s trademark black humour featured much more prominently to give it some needed levity) attested to that, whereby a British production company using Indian money and shooting in South Africa produced the Judge Dredd film we’d waited 35 years to see… if only they’d had a few more million to spend, they would have been able to more fully realize Mega-City One as they’d hoped to!
That’s actually a good choice. I actually almost thought of putting the original Star Wars trilogy on this list due to the way Lucas continually tinkers with them- though to be fair, the first Star Wars was the only film of the original trilogy he directed.
I always like it when a director is able to face their mistakes.
Good article.