Quentin Tarantino is a talented film director with lots of great movies to his name, including Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Django Unchained. He’s also an extremely opinionated person who will not hesitate to tell you exactly what he thinks about other films, filmmakers, and actors, even if his thoughts are very negative, which they often are.
Does Tarantino just tell it like it is, or is he crossing lines? You decide.
Paul Dano is “weak sauce”
Someone tell everyone who loved The Batman
Tarantino got a lot of attention early in December for taking some shots at Paul Dano, who’s most famous for playing the Riddler in 2022’s The Batman. Tarantino was appearing on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast to talk about his 10 favorite films of the 21st century, one of which was director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 historical epic, There Will Be Blood, where a budding oil baron (Daniel Day Lewis) is locked in a battle of wills with a preacher, played by Dano.
Tarantino loves Lewis’ performance in the movie, but thinks Dano is “a weak sister,” which I learned just now is an idiom for a weak link in a group. “I’m not saying he’s giving a terrible performance,” Tarantino said. “I’m saying he’s giving a non-entity [performance].”
If Tarantino thinks Dano gives an empty performance in There Will Be Blood, that’s fair enough, even if I strongly disagree. What’s wild is that he takes it further and suggests that Dano could be “the weakest actor in [the Screen Actors Guild],” saying that “[h]e’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy.” It seems to get really personal, really quick!
Tarantino “can’t stand” Owen Wilson
Wow wow wow
Also on Tarantino’s list of the best films of the 21st century is 2011’s Midnight In Paris, in which Owen Wilson plays a writer who visits Paris and is transported back to the 1920s every time the clock strikes midnight. Tarantino loves the movie despite one big stumbling block: “Oddly enough, I really can’t stand Owen Wilson. I mean, I can’t stand him.”
To be fair, Wilson’s performance in the movie did eventually win him over. “I spent the first time watching the movie loving it and hating him,” Tarantino said. “The second time I watched the movie, I was like, ‘Okay, don’t be such a prick. He’s not so bad. He’s not so bad.’ And then the third time I watched it, I found myself watching him.”
Again, the attack seems weirdly personal. It’s not “I don’t like his performances”; it’s, “I don’t like him.” Tarantino came around on Wilson in Midnight In Paris, but is that just for the one movie?
Tarantino doesn’t care for Matthew Lillard, of all people
This one feels truly random
When Tarantino came for Paul Dano and Owen Wilson on this podcast episode, he at least provided some context. Not so much for this one: “I don’t care for Matthew Lillard,” he added.
Although Lillard is having a revival right now thanks to his role in the Five Nights at Freddy’s films, he’s best known for playing a villain in the first Scream movie, which Tarantino also doesn’t like. “I actually didn’t care for Wes Craven’s direction of it,” Tarantino told Vulture in 2015. “I thought he was the iron chain attached to its ankle that kept it earthbound and stopped it from going to the moon.”
Maybe Tarantino has been nursing a grudge against Scream since the ’90s, and that’s why Lillard’s name came to mind when he was naming actors he didn’t like. Lillard responded to the comments at GalaxyCon, as you can see in the video above. “[T]he point is that it hurts your feelings. It f—— sucks,” he said. “And you wouldn’t say that to Tom Cruise. You wouldn’t say that to somebody who’s a top-line actor in Hollywood.”
The Hunger Games is a ripoff
Any Battle Royale fans out there?
Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2022, Quentin Tarantino talked about his appreciation for Battle Royale, a Japanese film about a bunch of teenagers ordered to fight to the death. He opined that The Hunger Games franchise, based on the books by Suzanne Collins, was a ripoff.
Tarantino returned to this take on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. “I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every f—— thing she owns,” he said. “Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her out on it…As soon as the film critics saw the film, they said, ‘What the f—! This is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
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So we have some broadsides against book critics there, too. For the record, Suzanne Collins has maintained that she’d never heard of Battle Royale by the time she finished writing The Hunger Games, which I can believe; I don’t think the underlying idea is so wildly original that two people can’t come up with variations on it.
Josh Hutcherson, who played Peeta in The Hunger Games movies, responded to Tarantino’s comments. “There are similar themes, for sure,” he told Variety. “But you know, everyone borrows from everyone.”
Quentin Tarantino refuses to see the new Dune movies
He likes the old bad one, though
Apparently, The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast is where Tarantino goes to air his opinions, because on a different episode from 2024, he talked about how he refuses to see the new Dune movies. “I saw [David Lynch’s] Dune a couple of times. I don’t need to see that story again,” he said. “I don’t need to see spice worms. I don’t need to see a movie that says the word ‘spice’ so dramatically.”
David Lynch did make a Dune movie back in 1984, but it’s so compromised that even Lynch has disowned it. Tarantino is against remakes as a rule, which I get, but I’d argue that the new Dune movies, directed by Denis Villeneuve, are the first time the Dune books have been adapted properly. They’re worth watching and can lead people to other sci-fi movies that are even more interesting.
And don’t think that Tarantino’s appreciation for Lynch’s Dune means he likes Lynch in general. Speaking to LA Weekly in 1992 after watching Lynch’s movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Tarantino opined that, “Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.”
Calm down, Quentin
We’ve really only just scratched the surface. Over the years, Tarantino has also taken shots at directors like David Fincher, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock, whom Tarantino acknowledges have made influential films even if he’s not a big fan. He’s said he feels a kind of sibling rivalry with Orson Welles, who made one of the most famous of all time in Citizen Kane.
I’ll say this for Tarantino: he’s entertaining. But I think I’d be terrified to talk like this for fear of running into these people at an awards show or something.
