The Canyons director Paul Schrader has laid into his star, Lindsay Lohan, for failing to promote the movie at the Venice film festival and for breaking promises to make herself available for its publicity campaign. Schrader wrote a Facebook post in which he declared himself “mystified and disappointed” by Lohan’s “refusal to support The Canyons”.

In the post Schrader goes on to stress how accommodating he had been: “I hired her when no one else would. She fought to keep the role when I wanted to fire her for unreliability. She has no other films in the can … I shifted the film’s European premiere from Locarno to Venice so she could make her promised post-rehab appearance. But she did not show.”

Schrader also details how Lohan had ducked press committments, including a proposed profile piece by the New Yorker and a cover article in Film Comment magazine (“I had to write a profile piece to save the cover”). She also “never showed for the photo sessions, including the session for the ad campaign art”.

The Canyons, written by Bret Easton Ellis and starring porn actor James Deen alongside Lohan, ended up receiving its world premiere at the Venice film festival on 30 August. The reviews were moderate rather than damning: the Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it “a punch-drunk and jaundiced piece of Hollywood noir”. Lohan did not attend. At the time, Schrader announced: “Today I am a free man. For the last 18 months I have been a hostage, of my own choosing, to a very talented but unpredictable actress.”

In his Facebook post, Schrader theorises that it was Deen’s presence that has caused Lohan to “turn her back” on the film: “She was never comfortable working with James Deen and perhaps this still sticks in her craw. I assume those closest to her, her family and reps, had advised her to treat Canyons as an indiscretion.”