So much can go wrong with the making of a film, with a director’s inexperience or arrogance, or a studio’s intervention or lack of it, among the most common culprits. Add financial pressures to the mix, and you have a recipe for creative combustion.

When things go horribly and a director would love to scrub a film from their CV or alter it beyond recognition, they often want the world to know why. From the director who tried to replace his credit with "Humpty Dumpty" to the one who got so irritated he punched a wall and broke his hand, we take a look at some of the most chaotic stories behind directorial dissatisfaction.

1. Alfred Hitchcock – Rope (1948)

Described by its director as “quite nonsensical” in an interview with fellow filmmaking legend François Truffaut, Rope saw Alfred Hitchcock throw out his own rules. This fun filmmaking curio exasperated many who worked on it, including its star Jimmy Stewart (who objected to the complex, carefully planned camerawork taking precedence over the actors), and was unenthusiastically received by both audiences and critics. And yet it has grown in stature over the years, and represents an absolutely fascinating example of ambitious cinematic experimentation.

Set in a single apartment, taking place in real-time and shot in 10-minute takes, stitched together to give a more continuous impression, the film follows two young men as they attempt to commit and conceal the perfect murder. Hitchcock had been keen to duplicate the fluidity of Patrick Hamilton’s play, but the production was beset by technical troubles.

In the end, he was dismissive of his own efforts, telling Truffaut in 1962: “I undertook Rope as a stunt; that’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.” When Truffaut pointed out that it was, at the very least, a positive step in Hitch’s evolution as a filmmaker, but that perhaps there was a reason that classical cutting techniques have prevailed, Hitchcock agreed, concluding: “No doubt about it; films must be cut.”

2. George Lucas – Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)

It’s hard to overstate the success of Star Wars and its continuing grip on popular culture, but not everyone is a fan. One of the biggest critics of the original has been its creator, George Lucas. He had a torrid time writing the script, which he was still dissatisfied with as production began. And, as Brian Jay Jones describes in his book George Lucas: A Life, the cast and crew endured a shoot that would “blow through its budget, mentally and physically exhaust Lucas, and so try the patience of executives at Fox that the studio very nearly pulled the plug on the film altogether”.

Although the special effects (the work of Lucas’s self-created company Industrial Light & Magic) were groundbreaking, budgetary constraints meant they didn’t match the director’s vision. In 1977, following the film’s enormous success (it surpassed Jaws as the highest-grossing film ever), the director described it to Rolling Stone as only about “25 per cent of what I wanted it to be”, telling the Los Angeles Times the same year: “I expected more out of Star Wars than was humanly possible. I had this dream, and it’s only a shadow of [that] dream.”

In 1997, Lucas digitally remastered the film and its two sequels, adding four and a half minutes to the original – including updated effects, releasing it as Star Wars: The Special Edition. These revisions proved extremely controversial among fans, though Lucas was unrepentant. “The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there,” he told Associated Press in 2004, “This is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.”

3. David Lynch – Dune (1984)

“I never thought I’d ever be doing a real Hollywood movie. It’s a lot of fun,” David Lynch told reporters early on in Dune’s production, as Paul A Woods describes in his book, Weirdsville USA. It was a feeling that wouldn’t last. Shot in Mexico, Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s space opera was enormously expensive, with a budget that topped $40 million and a huge cast, which included the likes of Patrick Stewart, Sting, Max von Sydow and then-newcomer Kyle MacLachlan. The team had to deal with the effect of power cuts, sweltering heat, cockroach infestations, smog and diarrhoea, as well as the influence of the famously overbearing producer Dino De Laurentiis.

The reception to the finished product was terrible, with the scale of the project, challenging story, outside interference, and desire to do justice to another visionary swallowing up Lynch’s own idiosyncrasy. If Herbert himself was said to be happy, the film bombed at the box office and was dubbed the “Heaven’s Gate of science fiction”.

Dune has cult appeal aplenty (Anthony Masters’s sets are certainly memorable), but ultimately it was an experience Lynch found extremely painful to talk about. Woods quotes the director as saying, “I was, you know, beaten down badly after Dune and in my mind I had nowhere further to fall.”

In the documentary David Lynch: The Idea Dictates Everything, the director opened up further to fellow filmmaker Stuart Mabey: “I sold out, so it was a slow dying the death, and a terrible, terrible experience.” Dune became, for Lynch, a lesson learned – as the director told Mabey: “Never, ever do a film without final cut.”

4. Steven Soderbergh – The Underneath (1995)

Steven Soderbergh made a splash as a young indie director with 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape. After a couple of commercial disappointments, Soderbergh was brought onboard Universal’s remake of Criss Cross, retitled The Underneath, in the mid-1990s.

In a 2014 interview for the Criterion Collection, the director spoke frankly about his miserable experience making the film. He described himself as “absent” during the shoot, and said: “It’s a very unpleasant feeling to know that, not be able to discuss that with anybody, and see everybody working so hard – the cast and the crew, to give you what you want every day, and you know this thing is just dead on arrival.”

Soderbergh has been keen to lay the blame squarely at his own feet, saying that Universal had their hands full with notorious disaster Waterworld, so left him alone, and that he had a great cast, which included Peter Gallagher and Alison Elliott; “I’m the one who didn’t show up,” he emphasised. The director missed the intimacy of indie filmmaking, and found himself fantasising about making his next project (the experimental Schizopolis).

When asked by Gilles Jacob whether he wanted to screen The Underneath at the Cannes Film Festival, he told him: “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever made” (apparently Jacob laughed). Nevertheless, Soderbergh does see it as an important part of his development as a director, saying, “I needed to bottom out in order to rebuild.”

5. Tony Kaye – American History X (1998)

In 1996, English commercials and music video director Tony Kaye was hired by New Line Cinema to direct American History X, based on a screenplay by David McKenna. A story of racism and redemption, it would be Kaye’s first feature and boasted a cast led by Edward Norton, fresh off his buzzy Primal Fear debut.

Kaye told The Guardian in 2002 that the shoot itself “went smoothly”. His original cut of the film was a trim 95 minutes, which attracted a positive response from test screenings. Nevertheless, the studio insisted on changes, with Norton assisting Kaye in the editing room to his great irritation and Kaye, at one point, punching a wall and breaking his hand. The version that was ultimately released was significantly longer and, as Kaye puts it, “crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other’s arms”.

Kaye was furious, with the director later admitting he became a nightmare during this time, drawing attention to his plight in the trade papers (he placed nearly 40 ads), nixing a chance for the movie to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and bizarrely bringing a priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk to a meeting with the studio, to the bemusement of them all. He tried unsuccessfully to get his name taken off the film and replaced with Humpty Dumpty.

Despite its director’s interventions, the movie was a critical hit and secured Norton an Oscar nomination. Kaye was done in Hollywood, but he has mellowed over time. “I appreciate now that I was an immature idiot, and a complete egomaniac,” he said. “But I had passion.”

6. Noah Baumbach – Highball (2002)

Celebrated writer-director Noah Baumbach has four Oscar nominations to his name, for the likes of The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story, but he didn’t always get it right. In 1997, he shot the film Highball, made over six days using the cast and crew from his previous picture Mr Jealousy, and focusing on a trio of social gatherings thrown by a newlywed couple. In a 2005 interview with The AV Club, Baumbach described it as a “foolish experiment... made with all the best intentions,” going on to say: “It was a funny script. But it was just too ambitious. We didn’t have enough time, we didn’t finish it, it didn’t look good, it was just a whole... mess.”

Baumbach fell out with the film’s producer, Joel Castleberg, and Highball remained unfinished due to a lack of finances. However, in 2002, it was assembled for a DVD release without Baumbach’s consent, and Baumbach and his co-writers disowned it. Asked how he felt about it being out there for all to see, Baumbach said: “I feel about as much ownership of Highball as I do the Hi-8 videos I made the summers I was in college. But those aren't out on DVD.”

7. Mathieu Kassovitz – Babylon AD (2008)

French actor-turned-director Mathieu Kassovitz won international acclaim in 1995 with La Haine, a blazing portrayal of racism and police brutality. He began developing an English-language adaptation of Maurice Georges Dantec’s science-fiction novel Babylon Babies as a pet project, at least five years before securing financing from StudioCanal and Fox. Although his La Haine collaborator Vincent Cassel was initially preferred for the lead, Vin Diesel entered the frame in 2006.

Page Six claimed that the director and star clashed during filming, and Kassovitz told AMC a week before the film’s release that Fox interfered with the production throughout. “I'm very unhappy with the film," he said. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be... it was a terrible experience."

Kassovitz had fallen in love with the book’s geopolitical themes and its warnings for the future. However, the finished product failed to live up to his expectations, with the director branding it “pure violence and stupidity... like a bad episode of 24”. In 2011, the documentary F**king Kassovitz took audiences behind-the-scenes to shed more light on the film’s disastrous shoot.

8. Joss Whedon – Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Ever since allegations of him presiding over toxic workplaces started to surface (which he has strongly denied), Joss Whedon has been a controversial character, but for a time he was a key figure in the world of comic book movies. In 2012, the writer-director won widespread praise for his work on superhero ensemble flick The Avengers, which became the third highest-grossing film of all time. However, in 2013 he told Entertainment Weekly that he had identified a “haphazardness in the way it comes together”, going on to say he was still proud of the film, and speaking optimistically about the planned follow-up.

Yet, in 2016, a year after the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Whedon told the Tribeca Film Festival that he had been “beaten down by the process” of making what turned out to be an overstuffed sequel. “I think that I did a disservice to the movie and the studio and to myself,” Whedon said. “The things about it that are wrong frustrate me enormously, and I had probably more of those than I had on the other movies I made,” concluding he had, “come off of it feeling like a miserable failure.”

Actor Mark Ruffalo, who was also in attendance, said that he pleaded with Whedon to return to the MCU afterwards, telling the audience: “I’ve been begging him, and he said: I’ll never do it again.” Somewhat scandalously, Whedon jumped ship to the rival DC Extended Universe a year later, where he took over on the post-production of 2017’s ill-fated Justice League.

9. Josh Trank – Fantastic Four (2015)

This one is a case of be careful what you wish for. Following the phenomenal success of his 2012 low-budget debut Chronicle, exciting young director Josh Trank was re-hired by Fox for its reboot of Fantastic Four.

However, once shooting began, the word from the Fantastic Four set was worrying, with The Hollywood Reporter leaking claims from insiders in May 2015 that Trank was "erratic", with plans for him to helm an upcoming Star Wars film axed (Trank has said that he himself made the decision to quit the project).

Fox ordered rewrites and reshoots and its own cut of the film made without Trank’s supervision, which attempted to lighten its deliberately morose tone. In August, the day before Fantastic Four was due to open, in response to scathing reviews, Trank tweeted, then rapidly deleted a message revealing his own misgivings, saying: “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve recieved [sic] great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

The film tanked and, speaking about the aftermath, Trank told Polygon: “I felt dead inside,” explaining that the experience sent him into an existential spin. “I didn’t want to be a big filmmaker anymore. That’s all I ever wanted.” The director returned in 2020 with the misfire Capone, starring Tom Hardy as the titular gangster.

10. Tomas Alfredson – The Snowman (2017)

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson made the world sit up and watch with his original spin on the vampire flick, Let the Right One In (2008), and his immaculate, similarly idiosyncratic take on espionage classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). So the prospect of him bringing Jo Nesbø’s bestselling crime novel The Snowman to the screen, with a cast led by Michael Fassbender, seemed very promising indeed.

And yet, the resulting 2017 film is a sometimes silly, tonally off effort that left everybody wondering what on Earth had gone wrong. It certainly didn’t help that supporting star Val Kilmer was recovering from throat cancer and had to have his lines redubbed, which has a strange effect on his performance.

Later that year, Alfredson offered insight into the film’s considerable shortcomings in an interview with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He explained that the production was rushed once he came onboard as a director (Martin Scorsese was originally attached) and that, due to a short shoot, around 10-15% of the movie’s screenplay remained unfilmed. This left significant story gaps, with Alfredson saying, “It’s like when you’re making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don’t see the whole picture.”

Alfredson returned with the Swedish franchise film Se upp för Jönssonligan in 2020, with a Rachel Weisz-led adaptation of Séance on a Wet Afternoon incoming.

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