12 Directors Everyone Hates Working With (But Get Awesome Results)

11. David Fincher

His Reputation: Another savagely perfectionist director is the legendary David Fincher. After his feature debut Alien 3 was butchered by studio interference, perhaps it's no surprise that he has such a huge desire for control, and if necessary, will put his actors through an excruciating number of takes to get a scene right. Case in point, Jake Gyllenhaal spoke to press about Fincher's tendency for extensive takes, even deleting the last 10 takes in front of Gyllenhaal, to which he said, "as an actor that's very hard to hear." Fincher later confessed that this was a psychological trick to see if he could make the actor burst into tears, in order to better reflect the increasingly fractured state of his character. In his own defense, however, Fincher added, "I hate earnestness in performance...Usually by Take 17 the earnestness is gone." R. Lee Ermey, who worked on Fincher's Se7en, meanwhile called the director a "little chicken s***" for being precious about sticking obsessively to the written word rather then improvising. More amusingly, Ben Affleck and Fincher butted heads on the set of Gone Girl over which baseball team's hat he should wear during an airport scene. Why He's Worth Working With: Still, Fincher's films are almost universally critically acclaimed and financially successful, and in addition to earning two Best Director Oscar nominations for himself, he has steered numerous actors to Oscar nods: Brad Pitt and Taraji P. Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network, Rooney Mara for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and almost certainly Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl next week.