Alejandro Jodorowsky’s big problem with Quentin Tarantino: “It’s not for me”
Filmmakers who appreciate each other’s work are often happy to celebrate it in a public forum, but the love-in between Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro Jodorowsky didn’t quite materialise after the latter made it clear the appreciation society was distinctly one-sided.
The maverick avant-garde auteur with a penchant for the violently surreal has been heralded as one of the most influential directorial talents of the modern age, with everyone from Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch to Taika Waititi and Guillermo del Toro worshipping at his altar, and Tarantino is very much among that number.
Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre has been heralded by the mastermind behind Reservoir Dogs and Django Unchained as being one of his favourite horror movies, and he even lifted a shot directly from Jodorowsky’s 1989 psychological nightmare for the Pulp Fiction scene where Bruce Willis’ Butch wields a katana against his captors having freed himself from his queasy predicament.
Thanks to Jodorowsky’s distinctive broken English, though, it’s hard to gauge whether he took it as a compliment or was merely stating an inarguable fact when he reflected on the situation. “Tarantino take a shot from here he say to me,” was all he could muster when looking back on his explicit NC-17 descent into madness.
He can’t condone Tarantino’s plans to call it a day and retire at ten features, either, with Jodorowsky remaining remarkably confident that he’s well on his way to immortality. To be fair, he’s well into his 90s, but that didn’t prevent him from teasing another three decades of potential cinematic genius to come.
“Anyone who thinks they will get older and die has a big problem,” he told The Guardian. “Tarantino says that he will stop when he gets old because the pictures are for young people, I don’t believe it. I am going to live 120 years.” Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, but it would be foolish to bet against him.
Despite maintaining his status as such a distinctive, visually daring, and esoteric filmmaker, though, he thinks Hollywood has become too stylised and business-like for his taste, which once more drew Tarantino into the orbit of his ire when he passed judgment on the gangster flick at large.
After being reminded that Tarantino was the name he was seeking to comment on in the first place, he launched into an animated explanation of his beliefs. “They are so businessman, too much business, too much camera,” he said, before doing an exaggerated performance of a camera tracking a bullet leaving a gun and heading towards its destination. “No, stop. That is not for me, no, it’s too much.”
Although it’s hard to gauge precisely what he means, it’s nonetheless easy to infer that Jodorowsky finds Tarantino and those cut from a similar cloth to place too much emphasis on style at the expense of the story, whereas he made his name by deftly balancing the two.
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