News culture Quentin Tarantino will not watch Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films and there is a good reason for that!
Published on 05/11/2024 at 1:45 p.m.
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As a well-known film buff, Quentin Tarantino often has strong opinions about cinema and its industry which he does not hesitate to share in interviews. Recently, the American director spoke about Hollywood remakes.
I don’t like sand, it’s coarse, aggressive, irritating…
Recently, Tarantino and Roger Avary (notably known for his work as a screenwriter on Pulp Fiction et True Romance) were guests of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, the opportunity for the director to launch one of the controversial declarations of which he has the secret. Indeed, Variety reports that the filmmaker not only defended the recent Joker: Folie à Deux by Todd Phillips but also claimed to have no desire to see the new films Dune by Denis Villeneuve. However, unlike Phillips’ film, these met with undeniable critical and financial success.
“I’ve seen Lynch’s Dune many times. I don’t need to see this story again,” says the Oscar-winning director. “I don’t need to see sandworms. I don’t need to see a movie that uses the word ‘spice’ so dramatically.”
Indeed, Denis Villeneuve is not the first to propose an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s books, since David Lynch had already tried it in 1984 (not counting the aborted adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky). But rather than a remake of Lynch’s film, Villeneuve proposes to return to the basic material, which he adapts through his personal vision while making some changes to the narrative of the books.
Offering the old again
Behind this somewhat embittered complaint lies a criticism that is not necessarily inaccurate. on the tendency within Hollywood to stick to “safe” licenses or remakes of popular works. Bad luck for Tarantino, Dune et Shogun (on which the filmmaker also expressed his lack of desire to revisit a story which had already been adapted in 1980) were both small gambles for their producers at the time of their releases.
Indeed, Dune may have been the adaptation of a cult literary saga, it had only known one adaptation with more than mixed results while Shogun is an American series set in the middle of feudal Japan and with a predominantly Japanese cast, in an industry notoriously reluctant to non-Western-centric narratives. Thus, it is damaging that a director such as Tarantino refuses to view his works on the principle that they adapt material that has already been previously adapted. If the basic material indeed remains the same, the way new creators look at it can lead to works drastically different from each other and, if the success of the two works concerned here is to be believed, the public is particularly receptive to these proposals.
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