Denis Villeneuve hits back against Quentin Tarantino’s criticism of Dune

‘I don’t care,’ said the acclaimed filmmaker

Denis Villeneuve, the director of the acclaimed sci-fi adaptation Dune, has pushed back against criticism from Quentin Tarantino.

Earlier this month, Tarantino, the provocative filmmaker behind Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, stated that he was uninterested in watching Dune, because Frank Herbert’s novel had already been adapted by David Lynch in 1984.

“I don’t need to see that story again,” he said, on American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. “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.”

He went on to rail against remakes more generally, listing Dune alongside Netflix’s Talented Mr Ripley remake Ripley and Disney+’s Shogun as examples of remakes he had no interest in watching.

“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.’”

In a new interview, Villeneuve has rejected the notion that his films – 2021’s Dune and this year’s Dune: Part Two – were remakes, but instead adaptations of Herbert’s original source material.

“I don’t care. It’s true,” he said, when asked about Tarantino’s remarks by The Montreal Gazette. “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.

Chalamet and Zendaya in ‘Dune’ (© 2022 Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

“It’s an adaptation of the book,” he added. “I see this as an original. But we are very different human beings.”

Following the critical and commercial success of Dune: Part Two, which adapted the latter half of Herbert’s iconic 1969 novel, Villeneuve plans to direct another entry, titled Dune: Messiah, based on Herbert’s sequel.

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Dune won six Oscars at the 2022 Academy Awards, and featured an all-star cast that included Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Jason Momoa, and Oscar Isaac.

Quentin Tarantino and Denis Villeneuve (Getty)

Part Two added Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Lea Seydoux, and Christopher Walken to the cast.

Dune Messiah is not expected to begin filming until 2025 at the very earliest, with many predicting that there will be a significant time jump between the second and third films.

The 1984 version of Dune, directed by revered Blue Velvet filmmaker Lynch, was a notorious failure, though has retained a small cult following in the years since its release.