10 Directors Who Admitted Their Movie SUCKED
2. Alan Taylor - Thor: The Dark World
Alan Taylor is a respected, veteran TV director who has worked on many of the most iconic TV series ever made - Lost, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, and Mad Men.
Yet the Emmy-winning director's cinematic work has proven decidedly more uneven, with Taylor helming perhaps the most pervasively disliked Marvel Cinematic Universe movie - Thor: The Dark World.
Though it received mixed-positive reviews from critics and performed solidly at the box office, in the near-decade since its release, it's held up as a forgettable also-ran entry into the franchise.
While promoting last year's The Many Saints of Newark, Taylor told The Hollywood Reporter that he "lost the will to live as a director" after working on the Thor sequel - a project which changed considerably throughout production:
"The version I had started off with had more childlike wonder; there was this imagery of children, which started the whole thing... There was a slightly more magical quality. There was weird stuff going on back on Earth because of the convergence that allowed for some of these magical realism things. And there were major plot differences that were inverted in the cutting room and with additional photography - people [such as Loki] who had died were not dead, people who had broken up were back together again. I think I would like my version."
Taylor went on to praise other MCU directors who have flourished in the system, though felt that it wasn't a good fit for him creatively:
"I really admire the skill set of somebody who can go in with a very personal vision - like Taika Waititi or James Gunn - and manage to combine it with the big corporate demands... I think my skill set may be different."
After being savaged by fans on back-to-back franchise shoots for Thor: The Dark World and Terminator: Genisys, Taylor said he wasn't in a good place as an artist:
"I had lost the will to make movies. I lost the will to live as a director. I'm not blaming any person for that. The process was not good for me. So I came out of it having to rediscover the joy of filmmaking."
Taylor rebounded by directing an acclaimed episode of Game of Thrones' seventh season, "Beyond the Wall," for which be received an Emmy nomination, and then making the broadly well-received Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark.