A comprehensive list of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movies from 1979
When it comes to strong-willed and asserted opinions of Hollywood and cinema’s golden eras, American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has many to spare. The Pulp Fiction director has consistently stated that his favourite decade of movie-making remains the 1970s, with 1979 being the year that tops the list.
Reflecting on this period, Tarantino once famously said: “I didn’t go to film school. I went to films”. With that, 1979 was a defining year in this journey of self-teaching and celebrating his favourite medium. The director was 15 at the time, attending classes at Narbonne High School in Harbour City, although he considered dropping out.
To offer a closer peek behind the curtain, Tarantino sat down with the Five Things podcast to share every movie from ’79 that he watched, explaining how each impacted his vision of filmmaking. “It was exciting because the whole life experience of it all was very exciting,” Tarantino shared with Lynn Hirschberg, as reported by W. “But the other thing that was really, incredibly exciting was… the films that played at Sundance that year were to start an explosion of American independent cinema that would last for the next six years.”
He added: “People saw these movies. It was a bit like being a rock star. Young people in college were following them and all of a sudden now it wasn’t music performers that they had on their wall,” he continued. “It was like the poster from the independent movie that they liked.”
One addition to Tarantino’s 1979 list is Lewis Teague’s The Lady in Red, a crime drama that sees a poor farm girl, played by Pamela Sue Martin, running away to Chicago. After getting arrested, she falls in love with a gangster, played by Robert Conrad, and turns to a life of crime. Before the podcast, Tarantino cited The Lady in Red as “my candidate for most ambitious film ever made at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures… Not only do I think this thirties era epic… is Sayles best screenplay, I also think it’s the best script ever written for an exploitation movie.”
Another entry on the list is Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic war film starring a brilliant cast of Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert DuVall. For Tarantino, this was “the movie of the year right as far as (he) was concerned,” he said. “I took the bus to Hollywood to see it at the Cinerama dome and got the program that they gave out,” he adds. “I still have the Life magazine where the with Brando on the cover. I was into everything about Apocalypse Now“. The film famously narrates an American captain who is assigned to Cambodia. There, he searches for a renegade colonel he has to assassinate, who has taken innocent lives and is believed to be a demigod by a tribe.
Tarantino then discusses Michael Cimino’s masterpiece The Deer Hunter, a dark psychological war study starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Cazale. In the acclaimed feature, three Vietnam veterans are kidnapped by enemy forces but manage to escape, becoming separated as a trio in the process. “Deer Hunter would have been the movie that would have been the movie of the year for me,” Tarantino tells Hirschberg. “I thought it was the best movie ever made. I thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen.” However, the director eventually settled on the opinion that “Rocky II would have been the movie I enjoyed the most.”
Rocky II was directed by Sylvester Stallone, who also stars in the film. It focuses on boxer Rocky Balboa recovering from losing to the world champion Apollo Creed, earning respect from others in the boxing world. Expect to see that and more in the list below.
Every 1979 movie Quentin Tarantino has watched:
- Take Down (Kieth Merrill)
- Hardcore (Paul Schrader)
- Boulevard Nights (Michael Pressman)
- Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (Daniel Haller)
- Norma Rae (Martin Ritt)
- Fast Break (Jack Smight)
- Voices (Robert Markowitz)
- The China Syndrome (James Bridges)
- Old Boyfriends (Joan Tewkesbury)
- The Bell Jar (Larry Peerce)
- Hair (Milos Forman)
- Love at First Bite (Stan Dragoti)
- Manhattan (Woody Allen)
- A Little Romance (George Roy Hill)
- Hurricane (Jan Troell)
- The Champ (Franco Zeffirelli)
- Last Embrace (Jonathon Demme)
- Alien (Ridley Scott)
- Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel)
- Butch and Cassidy: The Early Days (Richard Lester)
- The In-Laws (Arthur Hiller)
- The Main Event (Howard Zieff)
- The Muppet Movie (James Frawley)
- North Dallas Forty (Ted Kotcheff)
- Rocky II (Sylvester Stallone)
- Dracula (John Badham)
- Breaking Away (Peter Yates)
- The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg)
- The Wanderers (Phillip Kaufman)
- More American Graffiti (Bill Norton)
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
- Rich Kids (Robert M. Young)
- The Concorde…Airport ’79 (David Lowell Rich)
- and justice for all (Norman Jewison)
- Yanks (John Schlesinger)
- The Onion Field (Harold Becker)
- Meteor (Ronald Neame)
- When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton)
- 10 (Blake Edwards)
- The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard)
- Avalanche Express (Mark Robson and Monte Hellman)
- Starting Over (Alan J. Pakula)
- The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (Gilbert Moses)
- The Runner Stumbles (Stanley Kramer)
- The Rose (Mark Rydell)
- The Great Santini (Lewis John Carlino)
- 1941 (Steven Spielberg)
- Being There (Hal Ashby)
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise)
- Black Hole (Gary Nelson)
- The Jerk (Carl Reiner)
- All That Jazz (Bob Fosse)
- Cuba (Richard Lester)
- The Electric Horseman (Sydney Pollack)
- Chapter Two (Robert Moore)
- Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (Jess Margolis)
- The Warriors (Walter Hill)
- The Promise (Gilbert Cates)
- Phantasm (Don Coscarelli)
- Star Crash (Lugi Cozzi)
- California Dreaming (John D. Hancock)
- Ravagers (Richard Compton)
- H.O.T.S (Gerald Seth Sindell)
- Malibu High (Irvin Berwick)
- Van Nuys Blvd. (William Sachs)
- Hot Stuff (Dom DeLuise)
- Skatetown USA (William A. Levey)
- A Force of One (Paul Aaron)
- Nightwing (Arthur Hiller)
- Prophecy (John Frankenheimer)
- Cactus Jack (Hal Needham)
- The Frisco Kid (Robert Aldrich)
- The Lady in Red (Lewis Teague)
- Rock’ n’ Roll High School (Allan Arkush and John Dante)
- Americathon (Neal Israel)
- Swap Meet (Brice Mack)
- Seven (Andy Sidaris)
- Sammy Stops the World (Mel Shapiro)
- Hometown USA (Max Baer Jr.
- Jaguar Lives! (Ernest Pintoff)
- Roller Boogie (Mark L. Lester)
- Scavenger Hunt (Michael Schultz)
- Penitentiary (James Fanaka)
- Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog)
- Hanover Street (Peter Hyams)
- Meatballs (Ivan Reitman)
- Life of Brian (Terry Jones)
- Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer)
- Love and Bullets (Stuart Rosenberg and John Huston)
- Luna (Bernardo Bertolucci)
- The Europeans (James Ivory)
- Running (Steven Hilliard Stern)
- Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam)
- Winter Kills (William Richert)
- The Kids Are Alright (Jeff Stein)
- The Brood (David Cronenberg)
- City on Fire (Alvin Rakoff)
- The Shape of Things to Come (George McCowan)
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