Quentin Tarantino discusses the Alfred Hitchcock movie that “doesn’t really turn you on”
For many film lovers, you can’t get much better than Alfred Hitchcock. Known for his pioneering attempts to progress the medium forward through suspenseful and unconventional cinematic techniques, the British director is considered by many to be a master of filmmaking.
Quentin Tarantino, the controversial filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1990s with movies like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, isn’t so sure. He has discussed his love of many directors over the years, frequently paying homage to his favourites within his own films, but he doesn’t care much for Hitchcock. Despite the fact that Hitchcock proved to be a vital influence over many of Tarantino’s favourite filmmakers, the Kill Bill director finds the Master of Suspense’s work a little restricted by the era in which they were made.
When Hitchcock was most active in Hollywood, the Hays Code stopped him from showing explicit scenes, such as violence or nudity. While the filmmaker would break new ground by challenging these censorial rules with Psycho, much of his work was limited, believes Tarantino, by these restrictions. He once explained, “I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further. I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin’s and Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock.”
This is certainly a bold statement. These filmmakers wouldn’t have been who they were without the influence of Hitchcock, but clearly, Tarantino doesn’t care who influenced who – he’d rather watch De Palma channel the influence of Hitchcock within films like Dressed to Kill and Blow Out.
In an interview with Brett Easton Ellis, writer of American Psycho, Tarantino talked about his dislike for a Hitchcock film often described as one of the filmmaker’s finest works: Vertigo. The 1958 film, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, is a masterpiece of mystery, secrecy, doubles, obsession, and Technicolour, but Tarantino doesn’t believe it’s as good as everyone makes it out to be.
Easton Ellis asked Tarantino to elucidate on his feelings on Hitchcock, stating, “The other big two revelations for me were that you really were not a big Hitchcock fan and that a lot of Hitchcock left you cold, especially the fifties movies. And you also look at the Fifties as a very dubious decade for American film, almost up there with the Eighties. And that Vertigo doesn’t really turn you on.”
In response, Tarantino replied, “Vertigo, not at all. I really don’t get Vertigo. And I don’t really believe anybody who says they love it to that degree.” To Tarantino, Hitchcock is overrated, plain and simple. “I actually don’t like Vertigo and his 1950s movies—they have the stink of the 50s which is similar to the stink of the 80s”.
It seems as though Tarantino feels that Hitchcock could’ve done more with his ideas had there not been restrictions on what could be shown in the mainstream during this period of Hollywood where everything was kept as inoffensive as possible. Yet, Hitchcock helped to alleviate this strict censorship through his boundary-pushing work – he even included heavy homosexual subtext in his 1948 film Rope, which was unheard of at the time. It appears that Tarantino likes Hitchcock’s ideas in principle rather than in action.
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