The “fucking amazing” movie scene Quentin Tarantino hated by the end: “It took a shit”
After spending the last 30 years perched on his pedestal, peering down the nose at the mere mortals who can’t make movies as good as he can, the air must be getting mighty thin up there for Quentin Tarantino.
It’s OK to like what you like and hate what you hate, but taking a steaming dump over anyone and anything that doesn’t appeal directly to your sensibilities always reeks of entitlement, and few in the industry have hunkered down and fired out more disparaging verbal shites than Tarantino.
Paul Thomas Anderson literally chastised John Krasinski for saying he didn’t think a movie was very good, because he respects the art form and put across the point that a lot of people worked very hard on the production, and it’s an insult to their time and effort to dismiss it in such a fashion.
That, of course, is not how Tarantino operates. The whole brash and outspoken thing worked once upon a time, but when he’s trashing Paul Dano, Owen Wilson, and Matthew Lillard for no reason other than not rating them particularly highly as actors, he’s a guy in his 60s speaking ill of the people who populate the industry that gave him his livelihood.
Ironically, he’s edging nearer and nearer towards ‘old man yells at cloud’ territory, and he’ll be even older by the time he gets around to that tenth and final feature that he’s repeatedly denied has been making him increasingly nervous, even though it’s starting to look like the pressure he’s put himself under is only weighing heavier upon his self-confident shoulders.
With that in mind, what movie made such an impression on Tarantino that he was utterly enthralled at the beginning of a scene, only to find himself indignant by the time it ended because it hadn’t carried through on the promise he wanted it to have? A mid-budget action flick starring Charlize Theron from the director of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.
“When I’m watching like the long fight in Atomic Blonde, I’m like, ‘God, this is amazing! This is fucking amazing!'” he explained. “OK… wait a minute, no’. The shot took a shit. The shot’s not going on this long, it took a shit. So it’s all tainted. It’s all tainted. Because, obviously, they didn’t carry it through.”
The set piece in question, an extended sequence designed to look like a oner that finds Theron’s Lorraine Broughton laying waste to her assailants up, down, inside, and outside a building, needed to be planned within an inch of its life, required the star to nail every beat, and necessitated the use of dozens of stunt performers, handheld and static camerawork, practical effects, CGI, and countless takes to capture.
And yet, because Tarantino could see the joins, as far as he was concerned, the whole thing shit the bed. Lighten up, mate, it’s a great scene, and it’s not like his filmography is overflowing with superior examples of minutes-long unbroken takes with so many moving parts.
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