Deeply depressing.

There's something depressing about artists disavowing their work. It sucks knowing that if you see Prince in concert, you're going to hear something from The Rainbow Children instead of "Sexy MF" or "Gett Off."

That's the first comparison I thought of when I found this interview with the late, great Moira Shearer. It's from 1994 was the last interview that she gave; it's clear that her strained relationship with Michael Powell hadn't improved over the years:

Your last film appearance for Michael Powell was his notorious Peeping Tom.

Yes, I did that out of kindness of heart. Michael Powell arrived on my doorstep in 1959, with an ashen face and a large script under his arm. Could I help him? A small part - it would only take four days - the actress he had cast, Natasha Parry, had flown off to New York. At least, would I read the script? So I did, and thought it quite interesting, stupidly forgetting his sadistic streak. It was only four days in the studio and I saw nothing else of the filming, so the finished article was quite a shock.

Was it horrifying to do?

No, it wasn't. There was such an air of unreality and artificiality on the set and, as I've already said, Michael Powell was hardly the man to release emotion in his actors. I thought the critics were absolutely right about it*. I am only sorry that, recently, those violent boys, Scorsese and Coppola, have tried to make it into a cult film. It is deeply depressing.

Isn't that sad? She's in a work of art that's so cereberal, visionary, and raw that it took people decades to catch up to it and... she just dismisses it.

Deeply depressing, indeed.

*A critical sampler:
"The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing" (Isabel Quigly, The Spectator);
"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture" (CA Lejeune, The Observer); "sadism, sex and the exploitation of human degradation" (Leonard Mosley, Daily Express);
"from its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil" (Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker).