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.
But as the old adage (probably) goes, those who talk shit are doomed to one day eat it, and so Carney—who’s currently promoting the recent Sing Street, which features a cast of mostly unknowns and was shot back in his native Ireland—has offered an aggressive apology to his former star.