Begin Again director John Carney has offered up a wide-ranging mea culpa to star Keira Knightley, just a few days after he talked some pretty extensive and far-flung shit about her while promoting his latest film. Carney—who broke into the mainstream with 2007’s Oscar-winning Once—told the Independent that he’ll “never make a film with supermodels again,” and that he thought many of the movie’s problems stemmed from Knightley’s unbelievability as a singer-songwriter. It didn’t help that he lavished praise on the movie’s other stars, even as he decried Hollywood glamour and Knightley’s “entourage.”
“Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic actor and Adam Levine is a joy to work with and actually quite unpretentious and not a bit scared of exposing himself on camera and exploring who he is as an individual. I think that that’s what you need as an actor; you need to not be afraid to find out who you really are when the camera’s rolling. Keira’s thing is to hide who you are and I don’t think you can be an actor and do that.”
All told, it’s a pretty damning assessment of the actress, one that many of her other directors—including Laggies’ Lynn Shelton and Never Let Me Go’s Mark Romanek were quick to discount.