“I try not to repeat the mistake”: the career misstep that taught Quentin Tarantino “a big lesson”
Filmmakers don’t tend to mythologise themselves for the reason it comes off as self-aggrandising and self-indulgent, not that Quentin Tarantino has ever come across as someone lacking in confidence.
It’s the history books that tend to determine the greatest directors in cinema history and mythologise their work, but Tarantino seems as though he’s going out of his way to do it himself. He’s become increasingly obsessed with safeguarding his own legacy, as evidenced by a notable change of heart.
Having spent years reiterating that he was only going to make ten features and then gracefully recede from the spotlight, he abruptly scrapped The Movie Critic. There’s not much pressure being built around his swansong – the majority of it created by Tarantino – that anything less than one of the greatest movies ever made is going to be viewed by many as a disappointment.
An infinitesimally small amount of auteurs have ever compiled a flawless filmography, and while Tarantino is pretty close, Grindhouse is always going to be a black mark. The double-feature was a labour of love from the two-time Academy Award winner and Robert Rodriguez, but audiences didn’t reciprocate those feelings.
It bombed at the box office after the duo grossly overestimated how much the casual filmgoer was interested in exploitation cinema, and even though Death Proof was released as a standalone flick overseas to try and recoup some of those losses and it is in no way a terrible movie, it’s comfortably his weakest.
The Grindhouse experiment was a rare misstep from a director who’d barely put a foot wrong since Reservoir Dogs, and he wasn’t too proud to admit it. “I learned a big lesson with Grindhouse, and I try not to repeat the mistake,” Tarantino said to Vulture. “Robert Rodriguez and I had gotten used to going our own way, on these weird roads, and having the audience come along.”
The pair assumed, based on their previous work, that their fans would go and see whatever they made regardless of what it was, only to discover with Grindhouse “that proved not to be the case”. He doesn’t regret it, though, even if he acknowledged how “it would have been better if we weren’t caught so unaware by how uninterested people were”.
The lasting damage of Grindhouse was little more than battered and bruised pride, then, and an experience Tarantino will be hoping he never has to endure again. After all, if he sticks to his own guns, then he’s only got one more shot at making viewers fall in love with one of his films, which puts an incredible amount of pressure and expectation on his shoulders. Of course, he brought it on himself, so he’d better make sure he sticks the landing.
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