10 Directors Who Sabotaged Their Own Movies

7. Renny Harlin - Cutthroat Island

A flaming wreck with its architect standing gleefully in front of it. What an apt metaphor that is for the calamitous sea-faring production that was 1995's action-adventure dud Cutthroat Island.

Now, there are many, many reasons that the $98 million tentpole bombed critically and commercially - grossing just $10 million worldwide - but the lion's share of the blame absolutely lies with director Renny Harlin.

Fresh off directing back-to-back box office hits Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, a red-hot Harlin convinced producers to hire his then-girlfriend Geena Davis, not known for her action roles, as the female lead.

The male lead was meanwhile turned down by practically every bankable A-list actor in Hollywood, until Harlin settled on...Matthew Modine.

But Harlin wasted so much time finding his leading man that pre-production and script work were done without his oversight, and when he hated what had been done, set re-builds and script re-writes helped bloated the initial $60 million budget out. Harlin even spent $1 million of his own cash to finish the script as things spiralled out of control.

Elsewhere, Harlin fired the chief camera operator following an argument and more than two dozen crew members quit in solidarity, and his insisting that cast members perform most of their own stunts meant that film stock was burned through at a geometric rate.

It is an embarrassment of terrible decisions, most of them by Harlin, and some of them certainly by a desperate Carolco Pictures, who were subsequently bankrupted by the film's financial failure.