The actor Quentin Tarantino dressed like for three months
Basing your entire personality on a fictional character is a questionable decision at the best of times, but while Quentin Tarantino didn’t quite go that far, he nonetheless spent months intentionally dressing like a distinctively debonair action star as part of his ongoing hero worship.
Not only that, but the fashion influence even extended into his own burgeoning filmmaking career, with one of the most iconic ensembles sported by some of cinema’s most quotable rogues being directly indebted to the writer and director’s obsession with a particular style of cinema.
Like a lot of people, Tarantino was completely blown away by the recurring collaborations between John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, which yielded several of cinema’s greatest-ever action movies in a ridiculously short period of time, with A Better Tomorrow and its sequel, The Killer, and Hard Boiled all releasing within six years of each other.
As well as reinventing the concept of what the genre could be through its balletic gunplay, bullet-riddled chaos, and exquisite execution of grandstanding set pieces, the two-time Academy Award winner was left so enamoured that he felt obligated to channel the spirit of Yun-fat when dressing himself.
“I was really taken with Chow Yun-fat at a lot at that time, I thought he was one of the cooler actors to come out in movies,” he said. “He kind of had this Chinese Alain Delon quality. When I saw not even The Killer but Better Tomorrow, part two in particular, I got a big long coat like him, I got a pair of glasses like him and walked around for like three months dressing exactly like Chow Yun-fat.”
His infatuation wouldn’t end there, though, with his debut feature further channelling the spirit of 1987’s A Better Tomorrow II. In Woo’s sequel, four of the principal players in the story can be seen wearing black suits, white shirts, black ties, and sunglasses while going about their criminal business, and it doesn’t take a genius to see where Tarantino lifted his cues for Reservoir Dogs.
Just like in the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed classic, the core crew of thieves are wearing identical outfits, with Tarantino among them. It’s up for debate as to whether or not that was specifically how he dressed for three months after seeing the film for the first time because it’s just one of many looks sported by Yun-fat throughout, but even if he’d upgraded his own wardrobe away from the set by the time Reservoir Dogs started shooting, the fingerprints of A Better Tomorrow II remain there for everyone to see.
Woo and Yun-fat completely changed the game for action cinema during one of its most fruitful boom periods, to such an extent that a future all-time filmmaking great decided that’s how he wanted to dress.
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