Despite hating the director, did this Francois Truffaut movie inspire Quentin Tarantino?
There are no shortage of filmmakers to have been inspired by Francois Truffaut over the years, but despite his vocal disdain for the director’s work, was Quentin Tarantino one of them?
Of course, it’s hardly a secret that the writer and director responsible for Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is something of a cinematic magpie, who regularly channels or homages his favourite movies through a number of different methods, whether it’s replicating a shot, lifting a cue from the soundtrack, or peppering his movies with nods and winks to his influences.
Having gone on record slating Truffaut, though, it would be reasonable to assume the iconic founding figure in the French New Wave who went down in history as one of the best to ever do it wouldn’t be someone Tarantino would look to for inspiration. Ironically, he may well have done exactly that, and in doing so pilfered from the very type of film he was denigrating in the first place.
The two-time Academy Award winner famously compared Truffaut to Ed Wood by calling him “a very passionate, bumbling amateur,” singling out his late-period Hitchcockian thrillers for particular scorn by branding them as “just awful.” By his own admission, Tarantino is “not a Truffaut fan that much anyway,” at least until 1968’s The Bride Wore Black enters the picture.
Coming at the height of his thriller era, Truffaut’s adaptation of Cornell Woolich’s La Mariée Était en Noir opens with Jeanne Moreau’s Julie Kohler being stopped from committing suicide, with the freshly-widowed woman being left devasted by the death of her husband-to-be on their wedding day.
However, instead of letting her grief overcome her, she decides vengeance is a more acceptable substitute. Kohler scribbles down five names in her book of revenge, and then sets about eliminating them one-by-one for the role they played in her paramour’s untimely demise, with special treatment being reserved for the erstwhile head of the snake.
A planned wedding ending in tragedy? A bullet-riddled incident setting a quest for retribution in motion? A steely female protagonist tracking down individual targets and dispatching them? An elusive figurehead who played a pivotal role in the death of a loved one? It sounds an awful lot like the broadest strokes of Kill Bill, despite Tarantino disavowing this specific period of Truffaut’s career.
He rattled off a number of movies that were key touchstones during the development of Uma Thurman’s star vehicle, but The Bride Wore Black didn’t find itself among them. He may not be a fan of Truffaut’s work, but it can’t be a coincidence that there are so many overt similarities between the two projects, especially when Tarantino isn’t above cribbing from the past to inform his cinematic present.
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