Scenes That Directors Regret Shooting

Making a movie is a collaborative effort, but at the end of the day, the director is the one who's calling the shots. So it's sometimes tempting to see them as more than human, but really, they're just as flawed as any editor, screenwriter, or fan in the audience. And if they're just humans with their own faults and foibles, that means they're totally capable of screwing up a scene. 

In fact, some of the greatest filmmakers in history cringe when they remember certain moments from their own movies. Perhaps they wish they could've gotten a different line delivery from an actor, maybe they feel bad about a particular camera shot, or perhaps they'd like to go back and restructure an entire sequence. Whatever the reason, filmmakers can definitely make mistakes, and there are more than a few scenes that directors totally regret shooting.

The Evil Dead is one of the great indie success stories. This scrappy little film was shot on a shoestring budget, and director Sam Raimi was forced to improvise all sorts of unorthodox ways to make it. Shooting was pretty intense, and the actors went through absolute hell, but it all paid off in the end when the movie turned Bruce Campbell into a B-movie star and launched Raimi's career. But while he owes a lot to those disgusting Deadites, Raimi actually does have one serious regret about his sophomore film.

In perhaps the movie's most infamous scene, a woman named Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) wanders out into the woods where she's raped by demonic trees. It's a pretty nasty scene, and during an interview on The Incredibly Strange Film Show five years later, Raimi admitted the sequence "was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal." He regretted upsetting people with a completely superfluous scene and went on to say, "My goal is not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare...make them laugh but not to offend them." Raimi took that lesson to heart, as the Evil Dead franchise lightened up after part one, evolving into a series that was more concerned with slapstick and good scares than pervy plants.

Most everyone loved Titanic when it originally came out, but this romantic disaster also stirred up quite a bit of controversy. Yeah, there was that stupid debate about whether or not Jack could fit on the door with Rose, but more importantly, there were some who thought Cameron took too many liberties with the historical narrative, especially when it came to the story of William McMaster Murdoch (played by Ewan Stewart).

Murdoch served as the First Officer aboard the RMS Titanic, but didn't make it back to shore. However, there's some debate surrounding his death. Some Titanic survivors claimed that an officer committed suicide on the ship, and some theorize it might've been Murdoch. While there's absolutely no proof Murdoch is the man who killed himself, Cameron decided to get creative with the facts. As he explained on National Geographic's Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron, "I took the liberty of showing [Murdoch] shoot somebody and then shoot himself....We don't know he did that, but you know, the storyteller in me says, 'Oh.' I start connecting the dots. He was on duty, he's carrying all this burden with him, made him an interesting character."

Residents of Murdoch's hometown protested the scene, and Murdoch's nephew worried the film would ruin his ancestor's name. Instead of defending his choice, Cameron apologized, saying, "I wasn't thinking about being a historian, and I think I wasn't as sensitive about the fact that his family, his survivors, might feel offended by that, and they were." It goes to show that you've got to be careful when making a movie, even if you're the king of the world.

While he's not as famous as a lot of the directors on this list, chances are good you've seen at least one Will Gluck movie. He helped launch Emma Stone's career with Easy A, and he helped kill Cameron Diaz's with Annie. But while he only has six feature films to his name, Gluck already has at least two big regrets.

The first came after filming Friends with Benefits, the 2011 rom-com starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. During one scene, Timberlake makes a joke about Scientology, calling it "great science fiction," and in retrospect, Gluck feels pretty bad about the quip. Why? Well, the movie also stars Jenna Elfman, one of Hollywood's most prominent Scientologists.

"The way I work," Gluck explained to IndieWire, "I change the script a lot. While we're shooting, I'll yell out, 'Try this, try that!' We shot [the joke] once and then we left it in. But I feel really bad because I didn't tell Jenna about it, and then I forgot." So the first time Elfman heard the Scientology wisecrack was during the first screening, which was probably uncomfortable for everybody in the audience.

But that wasn't Gluck's only time apologizing for movie scene. After directing Peter Rabbit, Gluck found that moviegoers were hopping mad over a scene where the murderous rabbits prompt an allergic reaction in Mr. McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson) by attacking him with blackberries. The scene caused quite the uproar online, and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America even weighed in, condemning the sequence for making light of serious issue in a children's film. As a result, Gluck and Sony Picture formally apologized, saying that they were berry sorry.

While The Last Jedi split Star Wars fans down the middle, The Force Awakens was pretty much universally loved by audiences and critics alike. Sure, it took some criticism for being a bit too similar to A New Hope, but at the end of the day, the movie was a fantastic homage to the original trilogy — one that earned $2 billion at the box office. That much money means a lot of happy customers, although there is one scene that's bugged fans across the world. Why didn't Leia give Chewbacca a hug after Han Solo's death?

The much-discussed scene comes shortly after Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) plunges his lightsaber into Harrison Ford's stomach. Needless to say, Rey (Daisy Ridley) is pretty shaken to watch her newfound father figure get turned into a space kabob. So when she arrives at the Resistance base, General Leia (Carrie Fisher) comforts her with a big hug. That's all fine and good, only Chewbacca is standing right there. Chewie is Han's best friend, and Leia has known this Wookie for a really long time, so fans thought it was kind of weird that Leia would completely ignore her old pal for a girl she's never met before.

J.J. Abrams admits that it was a mistake on his part, but he also says he wasn't trying to snub Chewbacca. Talking with Slashfilm, Abrams explained it was simply a blocking issue. "Had Chewbacca not been where he was," Abrams said, "you probably wouldn't have thought of it. But because he was right there, passed by Leia, it felt almost like a slight, which was definitely not the intention." However, if you're looking for an in-universe explanation, Abrams says that Chewie was concerned about getting the injured Finn (John Boyega) to a hospital, so he was in too much of a hurry for a hug.

Alfred Hitchcock has long been hailed as the "Master of Suspense," but even a master can mess up. While he crafted some of cinema's most hair-raising moments — the shower scene from Psycho and the plane attack from North by Northwest, for example — Hitchcock always regretted a sequence from his 1936 film Sabotage. In this thriller, an anarchist-turned-terrorist (Oscar Homolka) hopes to bring London to its knees by bombing a parade in Piccadilly Circus. But instead of delivering the ticking time bomb himself, he gives the package to an unwitting boy (Desmond Tester) and has him do the dirty deed. The poor kid has no idea that he's carrying an explosive device, and Hitchcock ratchets up the tension as the unsuspecting kid climbs aboard a crowded bus.

Believe it or not, there's no last-minute rescue. The bomb explodes, killing everybody on the bus...even the boy. Hitchcock regretted the scene almost immediately. During his famous interview sessions with French filmmaker Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said the whole sequence "was a grave error," and he agreed with Truffaut that killing a kid was "close to an abuse of cinematic power." In other words, it seems that Hitchcock sabotaged his own movie.