[Editor’s note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we’re revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published August 10, 2011.] Earlier this summer, a shocking number of our readers flocked to read (and amend) our list of the harshest author-on-author insults in history. But you know who is even more childish, trifling, vindictive, and nasty than your favorite scribes? Your favorite filmmakers. These directors may not have quite the same precision with the written word as those rancorous authors, but when it comes to pettiness, they can’t be beat. After the jump, we’ll run down 30 of our favorite slights, slanders, and cheap shots from filmmakers both classic and contemporary; we’d love to hear yours in the comments.
1. Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni: “Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless.”
2. Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni: “Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.”
3. Ingmar Berman on Orson Welles: “For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”
4. Ingmar Bergman on Jean-Luc Godard: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”
5. Orson Welles on Jean-Luc Godard: “His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”
6. Werner Herzog on Jean-Luc Godard: “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.”
7. Jean-Luc Godard on Quentin Tarantino: “Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He’d have done better to give me some money.”
8. Harmony Korine on Quentin Tarantino: “Quentin Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like in a blender. I think it’s, like, really funny at the time I’m seeing it, but then, I don’t know, there’s a void there. Some of the references are flat, just pop culture.”
9. Nick Broomfield on Quentin Tarantino: “It’s like watching a schoolboy’s fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Quentin Tarantino would be wanking alone to in his bedroom while this mother is making his baked beans downstairs. Only this time he’s got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it’s on at a million screens.”
10. Spike Lee on Quentin Tarantino (and the “n-word” in his scripts): “I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively. And some people speak that way. But, Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made — an honorary black man?”
11. Spike Lee on Tyler Perry: “We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”
12. Tyler Perry on Spike Lee “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that… Spike needs to shut the hell up!”
13. Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee: “A guy like him should shut his face.”
14. Jacques Rivette on Stanley Kubrick: “Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it’s great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.”
15. Jacques Rivette on James Cameron (and Steven Spielberg): “Cameron isn’t evil, he’s not an asshole like Spielberg. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can’t direct his way out of a paper bag. “
16. Jean-Luc Godard on Steven Spielberg: “I don’t know him personally. I don’t think his films are very good.”
17. Alex Cox on Steven Spielberg: “Spielberg isn’t a filmmaker, he’s a confectioner.”
18. Tim Burton on Kevin Smith (after Smith jokingly accused Burton of stealing the ending of Planet of the Apes from a Smith comic book): “Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I would especially never read anything created by Kevin Smith.”
19. Kevin Smith on Tim Burton (in response to “I would never read a comic book”): “Which, to me, explains fucking Batman.”
20. Kevin Smith on Paul Thomas Anderson (specifically, Magnolia): “I’ll never watch it again, but I will keep it. I’ll keep it right on my desk, as a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work.”
21. David Gordon Green on Kevin Smith: “He kind of created a Special Olympics for film. They just kind of lowered the standard. I’m sure their parents are proud; it’s just nothing I care to buy a ticket for.”
22. Vincent Gallo on Spike Jonze: “He’s the biggest fraud out there. If you bring him to a party he’s the least interesting person at the party, he’s the person who doesn’t know anything. He’s the person who doesn’t say anything funny, interesting, intelligent… He’s a pig piece of shit.”
23. Vincent Gallo on Martin Scorsese: “I wouldn’t work for Martin Scorsese for $10 million. He hasn’t made a good film in 25 years. I would never work with an egomaniac has-been.”
24. Vincent Gallo on Sofia (and Francis Ford) Coppola: “Sofia Coppola likes any guy who has what she wants. If she wants to be a photographer she’ll fuck a photographer. If she wants to be a filmmaker, she’ll fuck a filmmaker. She’s a parasite just like her fat, pig father was.”
25. Vincent Gallo on Abel Ferrara: “Abel Ferrara was on so much crack when I did The Funeral, he was never on set. He was in my room trying to pick-pocket me.”
26. Werner Herzog on Abel Ferrara: “I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. But let him fight the windmills… I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?”
27. David Cronenberg on M. Night Shymalan: “I HATE that guy! Next question.”
28. Alan Parker on Peter Greenaway (specifically The Draughtsman’s Contact): “A load of posturing poo-poo.”
29. Ken Russell on Sir Richard Attenborough: “Sir Richard (‘I’m-going-to-attack-the-Establishment-fifty-years-after-it’s-dead’) Attenborough is guilty of caricature, a sense of righteous self-satisfaction, and repetition which all undermine the impact of the film.”
30. Uwe Boll on Michael Bay: “I’m not a fucking retard like Michael Bay.”