Quentin Tarantino is drawing quite a bit of negative attention from movie fans on social media for thrashing actor Paul Dano on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. On the podcast, the famed director named his top picks for the best movies of the 21st century so far.
He named One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, as his number 5 pick. However, Tarantino went on to say the film could have gone up a few spots “if it didn’t have a big, giant flaw in it… and the flaw is Paul Dano.”
Obviously, it’s supposed to be a two-hander. But it’s also drastically obvious that it’s not a two-hander. [Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister. [Daniel] is eating him [alive]. Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role. He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. Daniel Day-Lewis shows that he doesn’t need a strong foil. The movie needs it. He doesn’t need anything. It’s supposed to be a two-hander and it’s not! … you put him with the the weakest fucking actor in SAG? The limpest dick in the world?
Tarantino begins to laugh, and Ellis tries to come to Dano’s defense, saying he was “quite good” for what he needed to do. Tarantino responded with, “I am not saying he is giving a terrible performance, I am saying he’s giving a non-entity performance… I don’t care for him.”
As of this writing, Dano has not responded. Variety reached out to representatives of Tarantino and Dano, but no comment has been made so far.
There Will Be Blood stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in an Oscar-winning performance. Plainview is a brutal oil baron whose only priority is gaining more wealth. Dano starred in a dual role of twins, Paul and Eli Sunday. Tarantino and Ellis agreed that Day-Lewis’s performance and the “old-style craftsmanship” of Anderson set the film to lead the charge.
“It had an old Hollywood craftsmanship without trying to be like that,” Tarantino said. “It was the only film he’s ever done, and I brought it up to him, that doesn’t have a set piece. The fire is the closest to a set piece. This was about dealing with the narrative, dealing with the story, and he did it fucking amazingly.”
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