10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

8. Stanley Kubrick (Fear And Desire)

Fear And Desire Stanley Kubrick film
Joseph Burstyn

It's incredibly rare for a director to knock it out of the park on their feature debut, for obvious reasons - lack of funding, lack of resources, lack of experience, and so on.

Even the all-time greats are no different in that regard, and along with James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick is another legendary director who has complicated feelings towards his very first big-screen outing.

Though Fear and Desire has been favourably assessed in the decades following its 1953 release, urban legend has it that Kubrick once intended to destroy any and all prints he could get his hands on, simply because he wasn't happy with his work.

In 1994, he even called the flick "a bumbling amateur film exercise", and reportedly told Warner Bros. to issue a statement labelling it "boring and pretentious", in order to discourage people from seeking it out.

Inevitably, Kubrick's actions had the opposite effect, and curiosity in the film was only heightened - today, it's widely available on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!