The films Quentin Tarantino slammed without ever seeing them: “Those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist”
There are opinionated celebrities out there, and then there’s Quentin Tarantino. The director, who rose to prominence in the 1990s with films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, is a huge cinephile, and with that comes plenty of strong opinions about movies.
Tarantino found his entry into the world of cinema when he was young, and he nurtured his love of movies by working in Los Angeles’ Video Archives, where he met his future Pulp Fiction co-writer, Roger Avary, with whom he would come to share an Oscar win. At the video store, he had access to countless titles, and he used his intense knowledge of everything from niche titles to the latest blockbusters to recommend to customers exactly what they wanted to see.
The filmmaker might have transitioned to filmmaking in the 1990s, but he has still found the time to watch lots of movies and discuss them with anyone who will listen. Tarantino will even discuss movies he has no interest in seeing, leading him to espouse some rather strong views about movies he hasn’t even had the decency to sit through.
When Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was released in 2021, Tarantino expressed disinterest in watching the movie, making rather negative comments about the project despite having never seen it. “I saw [David Lynch’s] Dune a couple of times. I don’t need to see that story again,” he explained on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. “I don’t need to see spice worms. I don’t need to see a movie that says the word ‘spice’ so dramatically.”
The filmmaker added, “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.”
Villeneuve’s version of the film was much more successful than Lynch’s Dune, becoming one of the biggest blockbusters of the 2020s, but it seems as though the Timothée Chalamet movie simply doesn’t interest Tarantino.
More understandably, he once slammed two bad Ryan Reynolds movies that he believes are a disservice to the art of cinema. “I mean, and I’m not picking on anybody, but apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie and $50 million on the next movie for them. I don’t know what any of those movies are. I’ve never seen them. Have you?” he said to Deadline, seemingly referring to The Adam Project and Red Notice.
The director continued his tirade, adding, “Well, good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.” These movies might have received lots of streams on Netflix, but they were both panned by critics.
There was also an instance in which Tarantino appeared to criticise Ava DuVernay’s Selma, which explored the voting marches that took place in 1965 with the involvement of Martin Luther King, before he ultimately admitted he hadn’t seen the film. The director seemed to imply that the movie was nothing more than a television film, stating on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, “She did a really good job on Selma but Selma deserved an Emmy.”
It was a strange thing to say, considering that he hadn’t seen the movie, but he later clarified that he didn’t mean to give such a backhanded comment about it. “I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it,” he told IndieWire, perhaps digging himself even further into a hole.
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