Quentin Tarantino, best known for his supporting turn in “Destiny Turns on the Radio,” has never been shy about his taste in movies. Tarantino has long been drawn to aggressively masculine genre films, Westerns, war pictures, martial arts films, and anything one might have seen at a run-down grindhouse theater in 1977. He also likes very terse, tense movies, and has listed Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer,” and Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” as his favorites. He’s likewise admitted to having fond feelings for “The Great Escape” (who doesn’t?) and thinks very highly of Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.” It’s easy to guess that he similarly loves “Rio Bravo” and “Apocalypse Now,” and he often recommends the Sonny Chiba vehicle “The Street Fighter” from 1974. (“The Street Fighter” is described in dialogue in “True Romance,” which Tarantino wrote.)
Despite his tastes, however, Tarantino remains cinematically omnivorous, taking in hundreds of movies a year, sussing out the pop landscape and consuming every possible genre. Noticeably, though, Tarantino has never made a sci-fi film or a straight-up horror film (although his 2007 feature “Death Proof” certainly has elements in common with a typical slasher), often eschewing the supernatural and anything fantastical in favor of stylized ultra-violence. As such, one might intuit that he’s a little dispassionate when it comes to fanciful, magical, or technology-based stories.
As it turns out, Tarantino hasn’t even seen Denis Villeneuve’s recent “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two,” themselves based on the epic sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert. Although the movies have openly political underpinnings that Tarantino might enjoy, they still take place on a distant planet and centerpiece a bizarre, psychedelic spice that allows people to psychically navigate through space. There are also massive underground worm creatures, personally worn force fields, and wondrous flying machines.
In an interview with Bret Easton Ellis, the filmmaker explained why he hasn’t bothered.
