Quentin Tarantino has railed against remake culture, saying he didn’t watch either of Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed Dune movies starring Timothée Chalamet because: “I don’t need to see that story again.”
Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune was previously adapted by David Lynch in 1984.
Speaking on American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast, Tarantino said: “I saw [Lynch’s] 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.”
The Pulp Fiction filmmaker, 61, went on to highlight Netflix’s recent series Ripley and Hulu’s Shōgun as examples of remake culture gone too far.
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley was previously adapted as a film in 1999, while James Clavell's Shōgun was made into a television miniseries in 1980.
“It’s one after another of this remake, and that remake,” said Tarantino. “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.”
He added: “I saw Shōgun 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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Tarantino heaped praise on Todd Phillips’s divisive comic book sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, saying of the box office flop: “I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously.”
The Pulp Fiction director, 61, even compared the film to one of his own scripts, saying it was like a version of Natural Born Killers he “would have dreamed of seeing” before it was altered and eventually directed by Oliver Stone.
He continued: “I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the film-making 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. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or 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.”
