Quentin Tarantino, best known for his supporting turn in “Destiny Turns on the Radio,” has never been shy about his taste in movies. Tarantino has long been drawn to aggressively masculine genre films, Westerns, war pictures, martial arts films, and anything one might have seen at a run-down grindhouse theater in 1977. He also likes very terse, tense movies, and has listed Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer,” and Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” as his favorites. He’s likewise admitted to having fond feelings for “The Great Escape” (who doesn’t?) and thinks very highly of Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.” It’s easy to guess that he similarly loves “Rio Bravo” and “Apocalypse Now,” and he often recommends the Sonny Chiba vehicle “The Street Fighter” from 1974. (“The Street Fighter” is described in dialogue in “True Romance,” which Tarantino wrote.)
Despite his tastes, however, Tarantino remains cinematically omnivorous, taking in hundreds of movies a year, sussing out the pop landscape and consuming every possible genre. Noticeably, though, Tarantino has never made a sci-fi film or a straight-up horror film (although his 2007 feature “Death Proof” certainly has elements in common with a typical slasher), often eschewing the supernatural and anything fantastical in favor of stylized ultra-violence. As such, one might intuit that he’s a little dispassionate when it comes to fanciful, magical, or technology-based stories.
As it turns out, Tarantino hasn’t even seen Denis Villeneuve’s recent “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two,” themselves based on the epic sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert. Although the movies have openly political underpinnings that Tarantino might enjoy, they still take place on a distant planet and centerpiece a bizarre, psychedelic spice that allows people to psychically navigate through space. There are also massive underground worm creatures, personally worn force fields, and wondrous flying machines.
In an interview with Bret Easton Ellis, the filmmaker explained why he hasn’t bothered.
Quentin Tarantino was already over it when it comes to Dune
More than hating “Dune,” Tarantino is simply sick of the way Hollywood persistently revisits the same stories over and over. “Dune” had already been adapted into a high profile film back in 1984 by director David Lynch. Tarantino felt that the 1984 version was quite enough, thank you, and that seeing the same tale again and again wouldn’t add anything to his brain. To quote him directly:
“I saw [the 1984 version of] ‘Dune’ a couple of times. I don’t need to see that story again. I don’t need to see spice worms. I don’t need to see a movie that says the word ‘Spice’ so dramatically.”
Tarantino added that he sees Villeneuve’s “Dune” as the mere furtherance of distressing trends in Hollywood toward constant re-adaptation. He doesn’t care if it’s a “new take” on familiar material, he merely loathes that Hollywood will only adapt familiar material. It certainly doesn’t help if he was never fond of the original adaptations in the first place. In his own words:
“It’s one after another of this remake, and that remake. People ask ‘Have you seen ‘Dune?” ‘Have you seen ‘Ripley?” ‘Have you seen ‘Shōgun?” 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.”
Tarantino also noted that he doesn’t need to see a new adaptation of “Shōgun,” as he saw the Richard Chamberlain miniseries in the 1980s. He doesn’t care if a filmmaker literally sends him back in time to tell that story, because it’s still a story he has seen.
Tarantino, however, did love the new Joker movie
Tarantino, it should be noted, has no issues with familiar characters or intellectual properties. What he objects to are similar plots. After all, this is the director whose stock-in-trade is sampling characters, titles, music cues, and plot elements from his favorite movies, and remixing them into his own prolonged homages. His “Django Unchained,” for instance, was an extension of the many Italian “Django” movies released in the ’60s and ’70s. Tarantino relies on familiar stories all the time; he merely tells them in a new way. The only straight-up adaptation Tarantino has made was 1997’s “Jackie Brown,” which he adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch.”
As such, Tarantino was very fond of Todd Phillips’ new film “Joker: Folie à Deux,” a film he admired as an elaborate prank on the audience. The movie, in dialogue, tears down superheroes and their fans, thumbing its nose at the decade’s most dominant pop trend. Tarantino admired that Phillips took a very, very familiar character who has appeared in a dozen movies and brought a new spin to it. Not just a new spin, but a straight-up deconstruction. As he explained it:
“Todd Phillips is the Joker. The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, alright? […] He’s saying f*** you to all of them. He’s saying f*** you to the movie audience. He’s saying f*** you to Hollywood. He’s saying f*** you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers.”
Tarantino is willing to give new stories a chance. A new adaptation of an already-published story? He’ll pass. Except, y’know, for “Jackie Brown.”