9. Steven Spielberg - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
As the director of the
other major trilogy of the 70s/80s era, the Indiana Jones Trilogy, Steven Spielberg, along with friend George Lucas, created a series that was as childhood defining as Lucas' own Star Wars saga. Still, of all his films, the one Spielberg seems to dislike the most comes from this trilogy- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Spielberg has called the film "too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific"
and in a recent article on the making of the film, Bryan Curtis details how Temple of Doom was a metaphor for the emotional pain that both Spielberg and Lucas were going through at the time. Lucas was divorced from his wife, film editor Marcia Griffin, and Spielberg had recently split with Kathleen Carey, with whom he believed he was going to have children. Curtis describes the film as "a catalog of what it's like to get your heart ripped out," referencing the famous heart-ripping scene from the film. Lucas says it was a metaphor for his own heart being ripped out but "insisted the glee with which it was ripped out was Spielberg's." The film received negative reviews and one can surmise that the reaction towards the film, from critics and audiences, as well as the painful memories to which the film was related, made Spielberg, as well as Lucas, go down a more light hearted route for the next installment of the series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as the eventual fourth installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.