This summer, one of our foremost cinephiles, Quentin Tarantino, made it clear why he has zero intention of watching Toy Story 4. As it turns out, the director also has a similar embargo on Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies, albeit for very different reasons.
In a recent interview on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Tarantino revealed that he hasn't seen the lauded director's two critically acclaimed cinematic adaptations of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novels, which star (the real) Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. "I saw [the 1984 version of] Dune a couple of times," Tarantino told the host, referring to David Lynch's earlier adaptation [via /Film]. "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."
But sir, they're sandworms! And they inspired the Duneussy! That sort of innovation is almost what Tarantino seems to be seeking, seeing Villeneuve's Dune as a symptom of Hollywood's current obsession with remakes and rehashing old material. "It's one after another of this remake, and that remake," he explained. "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?" he wondered aloud. "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."
You can't really blame him for wishing for even a semi-original thought to become the plot. However, he also told Easton that he loved the new Joker movie — so take it all with a grain of salt, my Letterbox brethren.