Quentin Tarantino discusses his least favourite movie genre: ‘Biopics are showcases for actors’
A craftsman like Quentin Tarantino doesn’t really like to put parameters around what his movies should be. All great art isn’t meant to have rules and guidelines around every single frame that’s flying by, and while the acclaimed director does have some fantastic movies in his back catalogue, he did at least have a few movies that he felt he shouldn’t really touch.
Then again, it’s easier to look at Tarantino’s aesthetic and see the kind of director that he isn’t. The man doesn’t for subtlety all that often, and when everything quietens down like during the heavy dialogue scenes in Pulp Fiction, it never stops being entertaining because of how quick and snappy every one of his lines is. No matter if his movies take place over long stretches of time, you can tell that everything feels urgent whenever one of his characters is talking.
And looking at the kind of Hollywood that he showed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’s not like he couldn’t balance tones in his movies. Everyone who knows the films understands the hilarity of the blowtorch scene at the end, but no one would have cared about it had they not seen Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton struggle through a scene and then rediscover that old magic that he thought he’d lost.
But the key thing is that those are individual moments. There’s a certain romanticism in being able to capture those singular points of magic in a character’s life onscreen, but ever since the beginning of the biopic boom in the 2000s, Tarantino realised that it was best for him to stay away from anything autobiographical.
As far as he could see, he was out to make a documentary out of any of his features, and when talking about the biopic genre, he never felt like he could bring anything to it, saying, “I think it’s my least favourite genre. There’s hardly anybody whose story from beginning to end is very interesting. To me, those movies are showcases for actors, but they’re not really showcases for storytellers or directors.”
That’s not to say that there aren’t some great moments where a director’s personality shines through. There’s no doubt that Elvis is a Baz Luhrmann movie from the moment everything starts, but that’s also a bit of a knock against it. Every biopic suffers from embellishments, but Luhrmann’s take on the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ feels more like spending an entire day at an amusement park than a proper story.
On the other hand, the biopics that try to explain everything usually come off as a retelling of whatever the director can find on Wikipedia. Bohemian Rhapsody did deserve tons of accolades for Rami Malek’s performance, but given how much of Freddie Mercury’s personal life needed to be shoved into the movie, it’s not like anyone could focus on the actual emotional status of the Queen frontman during each moment of his life.
Although Tarantino is far more interested in making movies that detail certain storybeats that he’s familiar with, that’s not to say that he couldn’t make a good movie out of a certain moment in someone’s life. A lot of ground was covered in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, but given how Tarantino respected the rock legend, one can only imagine the kind of fireworks show he could have made out of the day that Dylan went electric rather than building up to it naturally.
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