Oscar winner Quentin Tarantino has stated that he doesn’t generally enjoy watching remakes and that he didn’t watch ‘Dune’, saying, “If you do one again, why are you doing the same one that they’ve done twice already?” Denis Villeneuve recently participated in a Q&A with students at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, Quebec, where he brushed off Tarantino’s comments about ‘Dune’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’.
“I don’t care,” Villeneuve said as the “whole room erupted in laughter,” as reported by the Gazette. “It’s true. I agree with him that I don’t like this idea of recycling and bringing back old ideas. But where I disagree is that what I did was not a remake. It’s an adaptation of the book. I see this as an original.”
Tarantino was a guest on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” earlier this month when he was asked about whether or not ‘Dune: Part Two’ was the best movie of the year as many have proclaimed. He didn’t have an answer because he’s not going to watch it.
Tarantino mentioned that he had seen David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ and felt there was no need to watch it again. He elaborated, “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 are 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 particularly interested in seeing it a third time. If you did another story, that would be interesting enough to give it a shot.”
Villeneuve added, “But we are very different human beings.”
Meanwhile, prominent directors such as Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg have praised Villeneuve for the ‘Dune’ sequel. Spielberg even told Villeneuve, “You have made one of the most brilliant science-fiction films I’ve ever seen.”
