The Quentin Tarantino movie Jean-Luc Godard dismissed as “not authentic”
In this life, a common maxim is “never meet your heroes”. It makes sense, right? If you have always idolised someone – an actor, a director, an artist, a musician, a writer – and in meeting them in person, you find out they’re just a flawed human being like everyone else, it could be devastating. For Quentin Tarantino, though, the maxim should be expanded to “never hear what your heroes think of your work” – because that way lies heartache.
In a 1994 interview with Film Comment, a parallel was drawn between Tarantino’s filmmaking style and that of Jean-Luc Godard, the influential French New Wave director of classics like Breathless. The journalist posited, “On the one hand, you’re making films in which you want the audience emotionally involved as if it’s ‘real.’ On the other you’re commenting on movies and genre, distancing the viewer from the fiction by breaking the illusion.”
In this sense, Tarantino’s movies are pure fiction on one level, but they also function as a kind of movie criticism on another – just like Godard’s work. Tarantino agreed with this theory: “That’s one aspect of Godard that I found very liberating – movies commenting on themselves, movies and movie history. To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms.”
In truth, this kind of high praise wouldn’t have surprised anyone who had seen Pulp Fiction and knew Godard. After all, the iconic dance sequence between John Travolta’s Vincent Vega and Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace is heavily inspired by a spontaneous, though obviously choreographed, dance featured in Godard’s 1964 film Band of Outsiders. Heck, Tarantino even dubbed his production company ‘A Band Apart’ – a play on Bande à Part, the French title of Band of Outsiders.
So far, so heartwarming—simply a fan paying loving homage to his hero in the form of a motion picture that changed Hollywood forever. However, things took a turn in 2004 when Godard was asked about Tarantino by Epoca Magazine, and he wasn’t exactly kind. In fact, he called Tarantino a “dishonest child” and described his movies as “null”.
In 2022, actor Molly Ringwald, who had worked with Godard on his 1987 King Lear adaptation, wrote an article about the director for The New Yorker. She touched on a meeting she had with him in Paris in 1995, in which they chewed the fat about recent film releases. In her words, “He didn’t think much of Pulp Fiction, the movie of the moment. ‘Not authentic’, he declared.”
Naturally, there was no way Tarantino would have been unaware of Godard’s comments. They must have cut pretty deep, too, because by 2013 he was telling Film School Archive that he had fallen out of love with Godard’s work.
The Reservoir Dogs director explained: “I’m not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore. I think Godard is kind of like Frank Frazetta [the legendary sci-fi/fantasy artist]. You get into him for a while and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him and then you outgrow. I think that’s what Godard is, at least for me anyway, as a filmmaker.”
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