Quentin Tarantino seemingly has no interest in watching Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune movies.
The Oscar winner was recently asked on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast if he considered Dune: Part Two one of the best movies of the year, as it has been raved by critics. However, he couldn’t answer the question since he hasn’t watched the films and has no plans to.
“I saw [David Lynch’s] Dune a couple of times. I don’t need to see that story again,” Tarantino confessed. “I don’t need to see spice worms. I don’t need to see a movie that says the word ‘spice’ so dramatically.”
Tarantino’s opinion has nothing to do with Villeneuve personally, he’s just tired of Hollywood remakes and wants to watch movies with original material.
“It’s one after another of this remake and that remake,” the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood filmmaker explained. “People ask have you seen Dune? Have you seen Ripley? Have you seen Shogun? And I’m like no, no, no, no. There’s six or seven Ripley books. If you do one again, why are you doing the same one that they’ve done twice already? I’ve seen that story twice before, and I didn’t really like it in either version, so I’m not really interested in seeing it a third time. If you did another story, that would be interesting enough to give it a shot anyway.”
He continued, “I saw Shogun in the ‘80s. I watched all 13 hours. I’m good. I don’t need to see that story again, I don’t care how they do it. I don’t care if they take me and put me in ancient Japan in a time machine. I don’t care, I’ve seen the story.”
But it appears Tarantino may be going against the status quo, as he also shared on the podcast that he actually enjoyed another movie this year: Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux. However, the Joker sequel was a disaster at the box office and among critics.
“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking. But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is,” he said of the film. “And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie. That’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.”
