10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies
8. Stanley Kubrick (Fear And Desire)
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.