10 Worst Defences Directors Had For Bad Movie Moments

No movie is perfect, and most of them very far from it. Even with the most talented cast and crew in the world, making a good film is really difficult, and so it's little surprise that most movies have at least an "off" scene or two.

Most filmmakers will simply take their Ls on the chin and move on without passing comment, but every so often they might feel compelled to address their detractors and even aggressively defend the problematic scene in question.

That's certainly true of these 10 directors, each of whom spoke out about sequences which were widely derided by audiences online.

Their defences, though, were ultimately incredibly far from convincing, smacking more of filmmakers who simply couldn't accept that their work, in this scene at least, didn't fully connect with viewers.

From insisting the bad scene was an intentional artistic choice to dunking on audiences for being unadventurous, and even trying to gaslight them into thinking about the scene differently, these excuses all fell totally flat.

The lesson here? In trying to "help" the audience understand a scene, it's so easy for a director to only make things worse...

Christopher Nolan has been regularly dinged for the "unconventional" sound mixing choices in his movies, namely not granting priority to dialogue over environmental sound effects.

This reached an infuriating fever pitch in Tenet, where many viewers complained that much of the sci-fi epic's dialogue was close to inaudible, which in a film so complex and exposition-heavy proved especially maddening.

But back in 2014, when similar accusations were levelled against certain scenes in Interstellar, Nolan had a defense which still holds true for Tenet. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said:

"I don't agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue... Clarity of story, clarity of emotions - I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal - picture and sound. I've always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster, but I feel it’s the right approach for this experiential film."

Basically, Nolan's saying saying that incoherence is an artistic choice... on a $250 million movie where clear dialogue recording should be one of the easier jobs. Needless to say, most viewers didn't have much time for Nolan downplaying the importance of audible dialogue.

In the very least, early reactions to his latest film, Oppenheimer, don't cite any sound mixing issues, so that's nice.