Tarantino is back on the podcast circuit and talks about stars like Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage in their latest efforts.
Recently, director Quentin Tarantino praised the much-maligned direct-to-video Bruce Willis films on his Video Archives Podcast. “I was really impressed by Bruce Willis in these movies,” he said. “I thought he was really charming in them. He’s really fun.” The director admitted that it was obvious that Willis was operating with an earpiece. “You can never have a scene where he says a line, somebody else says a line, and he says a line back,” he explained. “You’re getting one line out of him at a time, so there’s always a cut. But he’s making it work. He’s not phoning in his performances.“
When speaking of former stars who transitioned to DTV movies, Tarantino would also address Nicolas Cage’s uniquely zig-zagging career. However, he would spotlight one of Cage’s more recently acclaimed movies, Pig. Tarantino said, “In watching some of the Nic Cage stuff, the one that BLEW ME AWAY was that movie he did, Pig. That’s one of the best of the last five years. That’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last five years.” He continues, “He deserves to be proud of it… that guy who directed it did a killer job. He did a really, really terrific job. One of the things that’s great about it, especially after watching all the ‘revenge-o-matics’ we’ve seen, the movie sets it up like all the revenge-o-matics Nic Cage seems to have done in the last five years…this sets itself up to be that only to decidedly not go down that road in the most creative way possible.”
The outspoken auteur has been giving his impressions on many subjects recently, including why he refuses to watch the Denis Villeneuve Dune films and the FX series Shōgun. His other recent takes involve praising the not-so-well-received Joker: Folie à Deux. He explained, “I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie.” Then, he continued. “That’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.”