Quentin Tarantino chastises Hollywood’s remake obsession: “I don’t need to see that story again”
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Academy Award-winner Quentin Tarantino has reiterated his distaste for the state of Hollywood, saying he has had enough of remakes. The director has been famously uncomplimentary about franchises, even claiming that Marvel has made movie stars obsolete and that the movies themselves are not cinema.
His most recent comments came during an interview on the The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. When asked if he’d seen Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director said he had not and did not plan to watch the set of films .
“I saw [David Lynch’s] Dune’ a couple of times. I don’t need to see that story again,” he said (via Variety). “I don’t need to see spice worms. I don’t need to see a movie that says the word ‘spice’ so dramatically.”
Lynch’s Dune, which was released in 1984, had a tortured route to the big screen and the director has repeatedly tried to distance himself from it in the years since. However, Tarantino’s critical issue is with remakes as a whole, not whether Lynch or Villeneuve did a better adaptation of one particular novel.
“It’s one after another of this remake and that remake,” Tarantino said. “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’s support of Joker: Folie à Deux
In the same interview, Tarantino defended Todd Phillips’s Joker sequel, which has been widely panned and suffered a catastrophic loss at the box office for Warner Bros. “I really, really liked it,” he said. “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.”
The movie has been criticised for its slow pace, the uninspiring musical numbers that underuse Lady Gaga’s vocal skills, and its refusal to provide the pay-off that fans of the first film expected. Nevertheless. for Tarantino, its genius lies in its refusal to obey an industry that only wants more of the same. The director loves it for all the reasons that he hates remakes.
“The Joker directed the movie,” he said, “The entire concept, even [Phillips] spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?”
The movie is, he claimed, a “fuck you” to the audience, especially comic book fans, Hollywood, and “anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Bros. “Todd Phillips is the Joker,” he said. “Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
Tarantino may have found pleasure in seeing Hollywood studio execs wringing their hands in fear over the creative excess of a director they thought was in their pocket, but his opinions on the film are out of step with audiences and critics. The Joker sequel is set to lose Warner Bros around $150 million, while the widely Villeneuve’s widely praised Dune sequel was one of the highest-grossing movies this year.
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