Keira Knightley and John Carney in Hollywood's Latest Director vs. Actor Battle

Yahoo Movies
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Only one of these Begin Again stars pleased director John Carney (AP/The Weinstein Company, Andrew Schwartz)

UPDATE: John Carney posted an apology on Twitter on Wednesday. Read more here.

While discussing his latest musical, Sing Street, with The Independent, director John Carney turned the conversation toward Keira Knightley, his star for 2014’s Begin Again — and what he had to say was anything but kind.

Beginning by describing his newest movie as “a small personal movie with no Keira Knightleys in it,” Carney then proceeded to rip the Pirates of the Caribbean actress:

I learned that I’ll never make a film with supermodels again … I like working with actors and I wanted to come back to what I knew and enjoy film-making again — not that I didn’t enjoy Begin Again, but Keira has an entourage that follow her everywhere so it’s very hard to get any real work done … Keira’s thing is to hide who you are, and I don’t think you can be an actor and do that … I don’t want to rubbish Keira, but you know it’s hard being a film actor and it requires a certain level of honesty and self-analysis that I don’t think she’s ready for yet and I certainly don’t think she was ready for on that film.

Such candidly nasty comments were juxtaposed with praise for Begin Again co-stars Mark Ruffalo and Adam Levine, about whom Carney said, “Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic actor, and Adam Levine is a joy to work with and actually quite unpretentious.”

Related: Meet the Wannabe Rock Stars of ‘Sing Street’ in Exclusive Clip and Poster

It wasn’t long before other directors who’d collaborated with Knightley came to her defense, beginning with Mark Romanek, with whom she’d worked on 2010’s Never Let Me Go:


Shortly thereafter, Knightley’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World helmer Lorene Scafaria also weighed in via Twitter:

Lynn Shelton, who worked with Knightley on Laggies, added her endorsement of the actress:

While Carney’s criticisms came across as harsh, they’re hardly the first example of a director censuring his or her leads. Back in 1986, director Adrian Lyne took to the New York Times to put down his 9 ½ Weeks star Kim Basinger:

Kim is a bit like a child. She’s an innocent. That’s part of her appeal. She’s an instinctive actress … She’s not an intellectual. She doesn’t read books. She doesn’t actually act, she reacts.

In his Too Fat for 40 stand-up special, Kevin Smith laid out his less-than-pleasant experiences working with Bruce Willis on 2010’s Cop Out, which he’d already told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast was a “soul-crushing” experience. (Watch a NSFW clip below.)

Megan Fox got herself booted from the Transformers franchise after slamming director Michael Bay, stating that the filmmaker “wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for.” Bay later responded to that dig, stating that he still respected the actress, even though “she was in a different world, on her BlackBerry. You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven [Spielberg] said, “Fire her right now.”

Controversy-courting Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier made it clear that he repeatedly clashed with Björk while directing her in 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, telling GQ:

She didn’t feel like filming. It cost us a lot of money everyday. And we knew that her and her people would always win because they didn’t care. They didn’t give a s*** … It was like dealing with terrorists.

Perhaps no recent star, however, has elicited as much vitriol from his directors as Val Kilmer, whose behavior on the set of 1995’s Batman Forever compelled director Joel Schumacher to describe him as “childish and impossible,” among other things.

Kilmer also did little to ingratiate himself with director John Frankenheimer during the troubled production of 1996’s Marlon Brando-headlined The Island of Dr. Moreau. The director reportedly told Premiere magazine: “There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again.”

Watch the ‘Begin Again’ trailer:,