Keira Knightley has been slammed by a director who said her entourage got in the way of work when he made a movie with her.

Filmmaker John Carney also said the British beauty didn’t have the music skills he needed when he directed her in 2013′s Begin Again.

Talking about shooting another movie in Ireland, he told The Independent: “I had just come back from making this far bigger movie in America and I was a bit disenchanted with working with certain movie stars in that movie and I wanted a break.

Hailee Steinfeld, Keira Knightley, John Carney and Adam Levine
Hailee Steinfeld, Keira Knightley, John Carney and Adam Levine (Evan Agostini/AP/PA)

“I didn’t enjoy that experience of paparazzi and fabulous openings. The movie star world is not something that ever appealed to me.

“I like working with actors and I wanted to come back to what I knew and enjoy filmmaking again – not that I didn’t enjoy Begin Again but Keira has an entourage that follow her everywhere so it’s very hard to get any real work done, and so I was very ready to come back to Ireland and make films that nobody cared about who was in it, or any of that crap.”

John said the fact that Keira, 31, wasn’t a musician affected the realism.

“I think the real problem was that Keira wasn’t a singer and wasn’t a guitar player and it’s very hard to make music seem real if it’s not with musicians,” he said.

Quizzed about what he had learned, he said: “I learned that I’ll never make a film with supermodels again.”

Later in the interview, he referred to Keira again and said: “I don’t want to rubbish Keira, but you know it’s hard being a film actor and it requires a certain level of honesty and self-analysis that I don’t think she’s ready for yet and I certainly don’t think she was ready for on that film.”