Random Directors Who Hated Their Own Movies (15 items)

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  (#4) Tony Kaye - American History X

  The making of American History X has more twists and turns that your average Hollywood film. Although it began as Kaye's first directorial feature, after he began to cut the film down to a bare-bones 87 minutes, the film's producers suggested that he work with the film's star, Edward Norton, to beef the film back up. Kaye balked, then he brought in a priest, a rabbi, and a Tibetan monk in to the office of New Line’s president, elaborately asking for an extension on editing his cut of the film. The president said no, that they were going to release the version he and Norton put together. After the film was released, Kaye tried to get his name scratched from the film, but the Directors Guild said no dice. 
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  (#1) Josh Trank - Fantastic Four

  Josh Trank's reboot of the Fantastic Four was one of the biggest bombs in recent film history, and the director places much of the blame on the studio. In a since-deleted tweet, the director said that he had made "a fantastic version" of the film that audiences would "probably never see." Even before the tweet, stories of Trank's erratic on-set behavior leaked, and after, blame for the expensive comic book movie debacle continued to spiral out of control.
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  (#14) Arthur Hiller - An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

  When Arthur Hill set out to film an acerbic take down of the film industry, he probably didn't realize that his life would become an ironic extension of the parody he was committing to film. After seeing the final cut of his film about a director whose film is taken from him by the studio, he had his name struck from the credits, but it was too late. The film bombed and essentially killed the career of plenty of people involved with it. 
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  (#12) Steven Soderbergh - The Underneath

  Steven Soderbergh's first film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, absolutely killed at the Cannes Film Festival and set the bar for independent cinema for the decade that followed. Unfortunately, his first big studio  film, The Underneath, a film-noir about a man stealing money from an armored car, is considered "kind of a mess” and “dead on arrival” by the director. But don't  worry about Steven, he's done alright for himself. 
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  (#9) Alfred Hitchcock - Rope

  Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is one of the experimental and groundbreaking films that the director ever made. Executed as one long, uninterrupted, impossibly complex take, the movie revolves around a murder that may or may not have happened. After its release, Hitchcock referred to the film as nothing more than a stunt. Even if Hitch didn't think too highly of it, Rope is an fascinating piece of cinematic history. 
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  (#7) David Lynch - Dune

  David Lynch is a weirdo cinematic visionary, so it makes sense that the one film in his oeuvre that he distances himself from is Dune, the adaptation of Frank Herbert's literary sic-fi classic.Lynch rarely speaks about the film, but he has mentioned that he wasn't given final cut of the film, an early mainstream effort from a notorious oddball. His lack of creative control on Dune probably has something to do with its expulsion from his canon. When the studio cobbled together a extra hour of cut footage to assemble an 'extended cut,' Lynch asked that they change his screenwriting credit to the pseudonym "Judas Booth" - an amalgam of Judas Iscariot and John Wilkes Booth - to signify his feelings towards what he believed was the studio's 'betrayal.'

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