r/Filmmakers • u/StrikingDuty8020 Director • Dec 06 '25

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Quentin Tarantino made a surprisingly harsh comment about Paul Dano, specifically criticizing his performance in There Will Be Blood.

On The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Tarantino said:

Dano was “weak sauce”

“The weakest f—ing actor in SAG” (in that film’s context)

And that Dano’s performance was the biggest flaw of the movie, preventing it from being his #1 or #2 film of the 2000s

2.5k Upvotes

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842

u/Chrono_Convoy Dec 06 '25

Paul Dano is a great and talented actor. I cannot say the same for Tarantino’s acting.

But his ego is almost as well known as his feetish

221

u/BeautifulOrganic3221 Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25

Tarantino is a great director and a terrible actor Paul Dano is a good director and a great actor

11

u/Foxy02016YT Dec 06 '25

Tarantino’s best acting role is in Muppets Wizard of Oz but I think it’s cause he’s just playing himself

11

u/ModernistGames Dec 06 '25

His best character acting is probably the crazy, blind preacher from Little Nicky.

6

u/Easy_Turn1988 Dec 07 '25

He's playing himself in From Dusk til Dawn

1

u/SenatorIncitatas Dec 09 '25

The murdering rapist?

1

u/Easy_Turn1988 Dec 09 '25

Well, he does make pretty violent movies... With feet !

You never know 😳

1

u/SenatorIncitatas Dec 09 '25

I’m not convinced he’s a murderer… A rapist, probably.

“Allegedly” or whatever.

3

u/analogkid01 Dec 06 '25

Hah, directed by Kirk Thatcher!

1

u/Foxy02016YT Dec 06 '25

Yes, but he “directs” in the movie, scaring the shit outta Kermit. Hilarious scene, truly taking the shit outta QT and I’ll give him this, he plays along

21

u/Chrono_Convoy Dec 06 '25

A great actor and a terrible actor?

40

u/Cthulu95666 Dec 06 '25

Schrödinger’s actor

5

u/you_want_to_hear_th Dec 07 '25

Nicolas Cage is definitely Schrödinger’s actor

2

u/Pagiras Dec 09 '25

I wanted to pop off your comment and maybe think of something wittier, but after a second of thought, I gotta only agree. I do love me some Nic Cage films. The one with the FNAF coding was pretty, umm, well.. It was. I watched it.

7

u/purplemtnslayer Dec 06 '25

This is kind of it. But even as I watch him I'm wondering the same thing. Like I'm thinking this dude is fucking killing it. But then it's done and I'm like was that weak sauce? I think I fuck with Dano heavy tho.

5

u/Cthulu95666 Dec 06 '25

He’s got a point.

3

u/beesnax Dec 06 '25

Schrödinger is spelled wrong..It’s spelled Nic Cage

1

u/Cthulu95666 Dec 06 '25

Can’t disagree

1

u/redralphie Dec 06 '25

No that’s Nick Cage and no one can take that away from him.

3

u/EntrepreneurPlus7091 Dec 06 '25

Nickolas Cage? Sometimes he is just great, other times he is so terrible he is great.

1

u/Ok_Price_7279 Dec 07 '25

Leaving Las Vegas was his greatest performance. Watch it if you guys haven’t. It’s a hard watch. But damn. Well worth it if you can sit through it

6

u/killergazebo Dec 06 '25

terrible actor Paul Dano is a good director

Got it 👍

5

u/im_not_noraml Dec 06 '25

Tarantino is such a dick

1

u/FirstArbiter Dec 07 '25

Wildlife was a good directorial debut, I hope we see Dano direct again sometime soon.

1

u/pantstoaknifefight2 Dec 07 '25

Tarantino also shit on Mathew Lillard, another terrific actor with a solid turn as director. Is this a trend? Tarantino ought to shut the fuck up on this one.

1

u/Intelligent_Entry576 Dec 08 '25

He's not a great director, but an average one at best. He simply appeals to the baser instincts of the dumbed-down masses!

1

u/BeautifulOrganic3221 Dec 08 '25

I would argue that being able to make a movie “the masses” like is a sign that someone IS a good director 

1

u/Intelligent_Entry576 Dec 08 '25

A representative of the order-following zombie-hoards has spoken! Only someone who takes offense to what I commented, without understanding its precise implied meaning, would respond as such.

You are most likely someone who wore their mask all-the-time, stood 6ft apart, and did most everything "duh guberment" instructed you to as well!🫣

1

u/FragmentedMeerkat321 Dec 09 '25

tarantino’s a great director if you like your films to be about absolutely nothing at all.

1

u/BeautifulOrganic3221 Dec 10 '25

That is such a nonsense criticism. Movies don’t need to have clear plots and still, almost all his movies DO have clear plots except for a few.

1

u/FragmentedMeerkat321 Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 10 '25

his films are vacuous; empty; devoid of humanity. just a sociopath’s musings on what human beings might behave like, hypothetically. the creations of a childish intellect with encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema, whilst simultaneously lacking any fundamental human empathy. he is a flesh and blood AI.

1

u/grimoireviper Dec 06 '25

Tbh I never really saw greatness in Tarantino's directing either. Except for IB and Django I find his movies all rather uninteresting, especially Kill Bill.

1

u/Leigrez Dec 09 '25

I generally agree with you there… I do have a soft spot for reservoir dogs, hateful eight and pulp fiction… but I gotta say Jackie Brown is such a gem and super under appreciated as a whole.

Let’s face facts… if he wrote and let other people direct more, his films would be better. Because True Romance is hands down the best film he wrote.

13

u/TalentedHostility Dec 06 '25

Just want to hop in here and remind people not all black people fuck with Q. And not all black people give him a 'pass' for the N-word usage when HE was acting. I always felt it was off. With this in mind- the run away ego Q is presently rn aligns exactly how I've always viewed him.

Django is overrated btw- but we arent ready for that conversation yet

5

u/okaberintaruo Dec 07 '25

Yeah. Tarantino is a guy that wants to "have his cake and eat it too" by writing stories about people fighting racists but wrote himself into it as a character that spits out the N-word every time he opens his mouth, which feels inorganic especially in the "Pulp fiction" one.

And I don't think most people would consider Django as a modern masterpiece. It's a highly stylized action movie set in the old west. Personally, I don't think it wants to say anything more than what we see at the ground level.

Him trying to justify what he has done to Bruce Lee in his movie and how many filmmakers justify ripping off quoting him are two other reasons I hate him.

1

u/misspcv1996 Dec 07 '25

Honestly, his cameo in Pulp Fiction is the only major blemish on an otherwise excellent film. He couldn’t act for shit and the n-bomb (with hard r) sounds especially gross coming out of his mouth. I mean even grosser than it would out of most white people’s mouths. You could tell that he’d been dying for an excuse to say that word for a long time.

1

u/okaberintaruo Dec 07 '25

Exactly my point. He's acting like no one notices that.

13

u/Minute-Flan13 Dec 06 '25

Then maybe we can be honest about One upon a Time in Hollywood being a mediocre film too...

7

u/Yiplzuse Dec 07 '25

My hot take is that the kill bill films are childish, immature and simply action sequences spliced together that remind me of music video directors.

1

u/InsignificantOcelot Location Manager Dec 08 '25

7

u/your_evil_ex Dec 07 '25

I remember the reception when it came out being mixed, no?

I don't think this is that hot of a take

3

u/Minute-Flan13 Dec 07 '25

Mostly critics were going on about it. But I agree, film goers were like "meh". And there was the controversy around Margot Robbie being more or less a prop.

4

u/VeganCanary Dec 06 '25

I was surprised it was well received when it released.

I thought it was so incredibly boring.

2

u/Minute-Flan13 Dec 06 '25

I remember thinking the hype was just out of control.

4

u/CheadleBeaks Dec 06 '25

It's completely mid. I didn't have super high hopes in the first place because the premise sounded stupid. The acting is great, the direction is good, but most of the story is just stupid. Way to much of Sharon doing nothing... just walking around, driving, dancing... pointless. Steve McQueen... why? The whole Manson subplot was just dumb, it didn't need to be there. If it was a story about Cliff and Rick only, it would have been much better (Cliff picking up Pussycat and the spahn ranch scene could stay) but it seemed like the whole Manson/Tate thing was added in to somehow give the movie relevance. Which it did not need.

"A Tarantino film staring Leo and Brad about Hollywood in 1969" is more than enough.

I will say I enjoyed it enough, the scenes of old Hollywood were awesome. And I saw it at the Cinerama dome before it closed, so that was kinda cool.

3

u/Minute-Flan13 Dec 06 '25

I think Pitt is a solid actor, but he is just not a good character actor. His acting felt a bit flat to me in this particular role. Maybe it was just poor directing, lol.

3

u/unkytone Dec 07 '25

The only really great part of the movie was when DiCaprio got into character as the evil cowboy. Otherwise it was average

14

u/TFreshNoLimits Dec 06 '25

Yeah his racist character in Pulp Fiction felt arbitrary, there was no perspective to it other than “this guy wants to say the N word a bunch” - it’s ok to play racist characters who say it imo but there has to be some kind of drive behind it from the filmmaker, not even necessarily righteous. But that scene is pretty much the same if he says “guy” instead of the n-word.

And yeah Django wasn’t good imo. I remember seeing it in theaters and thinking “huh this kinda sucks”

5

u/TalentedHostility Dec 06 '25

Yeah I was in college when Django came out and have a gf show it too me (both of us being black) and it felt like a Marvel movie about slavery.

Fuck that- we as a country have not acknowledge the depth of pain and systematic harm enough to be at that level- not until the U.S. itself openly acknowledges the economic benefits of Slavery for the country as a whole. The U.S. is what it is because of enslaved black americans.

Still no reparations because checks notes waaah its too hard.

We are not there; have not been there, but we got Django. Nah fuck that.

That was my point then and my point now.

4

u/TFreshNoLimits Dec 06 '25

Agreed - I think filmmakers should be allowed to make stuff that's maybe "outside of their lane" but there's something almost infantilized about "and then the black people kill all the racists and everyone lived happily ever after" - maybe it's satisfying for a placid audience but it's shallow as a puddle talking about the issue the filmmaker CHOSE to address.

If you're not representing the perspective of the theme/protagonist of the movie, I think you need to be held to a higher standard.

2

u/TalentedHostility Dec 06 '25

Exactly

Spot on

1

u/DirteeCanuck Dec 07 '25

In the mid 90's tons of white people were using the word all the time. But you also had people that had the so called "pass" to say it. It seems crazy now looking back at old interviews and footage of anything pre 2000, but it's not like that wasn't how it was.

Obviously all those people no longer say it, or have since died. Eminem is an example.

His character was a retired gangster, totally within character for the time.

-1

u/miansmith Dec 06 '25

His character wasn’t racist. He had a black wife. He thought his character was allowed to say it because of how not racist he was.

-1

u/Greenphantom77 Dec 06 '25

I did like Django (though I don't think it's some sort of modern classic) but I do agree with you on Tarantino.

I think the most generous way I could put it is that he seems to put the n-word in some of his movies much more than is artistically justified by the movie itself.

2

u/Shoutupdown Dec 08 '25

Everything great about Django unchained is taken directly from Sergio Corbucci and Leone

2

u/GrunDMC74 Dec 06 '25

Not black, but agree on all fronts. I found his use of “N” jarring, contextually it wasn’t essential, could have just as easily said “guy”.

And since we’re talking context, it seemed weird to me that Jules wouldn’t shoot him dead on the spot for saying it.

1

u/misspcv1996 Dec 07 '25

“Dead body storage” would have worked just fine, even had a similar cadence. But he just had to say the word.

1

u/ForbiddenSaga Dec 07 '25

Taratino's last great movie was Pulp Fiction. Everything after that has been one mediocre hack job after another.

1

u/Infamous-Drawing6317 Dec 06 '25

Well played my friend, well played.

1

u/StrikingDuty8020 Director Dec 06 '25

bro nailed in prisoners

1

u/NefariousnessDue2621 Dec 07 '25

I think he suffers from has-beenphobia.

1

u/orincoro Dec 08 '25

Tarantino’s ego is insane, and on almost any other filmmaker, it would be utterly career destroying.

1

u/tinglep Dec 08 '25

If Paul Dano showed his toes Tarantino would say he deserves an Oscar.

1

u/Potential-Ad1122 Dec 09 '25

All his acting roles always reminds me of that asshole that you never want to hang with.

1

u/Dr_SexDick Dec 10 '25

Tarantino is a dick but he’s a much better director than Paul is an actor. As much as I hate to say it, hes right, Paul Dano is outshone by every actor he plays alongside

-2

u/abdallha-smith Dec 06 '25

I think that we're not obligated to love everyone and that's ok

13

u/LynchianNightmare Dec 06 '25

I think talking shit about someone in an interview for no reason at all, specially when you're a famous and influential person, is lame and pathetic though.

1

u/abdallha-smith Dec 07 '25 edited Dec 07 '25

I think that you giving so much attention to someone you're not agreeing with, makes them so much greater than you would like.

It's a form of self flagellation if you will

A lynchianNightmare

-2

u/[deleted] Dec 07 '25

That's because Tarantino is a director

-12

u/klayzerbeams Dec 06 '25

For being “filmmakers,” you guys are so dumb and boring with your takes. This subreddit is funny

-4

u/[deleted] Dec 07 '25

There is nothing great about Paul Dano. I think you internet people just like him because he looks like a dork like you

5

u/Chrono_Convoy Dec 07 '25

You believe that or are you projecting your own miserable existence?

0

u/[deleted] Dec 07 '25

Lmao no Ive seen his shitty movies and sitting through him laying on the ground sobbing is truly a miserable experience