The director that made Quentin Tarantino “feel like hiding under the carpet”
America’s greatest living auteur, Quentin Tarantino, is a true savant of cinema. From his early childhood, his obsession with the silver screen has gone largely unrivalled. Since emerging in the early 1990s, Tarantino’s distinctive, unique style has never ceased to entertain and owes its allure to an unconventional baptism in a California video rental store.
When he was 22, Tarantino secured his first full-time job at Video Archives, a store in Manhattan Beach, California. As explained in several interviews, he didn’t become a cinephile because he worked there; he was hired because he was a cinephile. Like a pig in a ball pit, Tarantino began to expand his already expansive pool of influence as he got cracking on some early screenplays.
Instead of attending film school, like many of his luminaries, Tarantino simply observed, absorbing the greatest aspects of each director’s nuances. Discussing his approach to education with The Talks, he once explained: “[My] head is a sponge. I listen to what everyone says, I watch little idiosyncratic behaviour, people tell me a joke, and I remember it. People tell me an interesting story in their life, and I remember it”.
One such director that Tarantino idolised, even before his Video Archives days, was Martin Scorsese. Like practically everyone else, the aspiring filmmaker was astonished by the New York director’s seminal work on titles like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Overall, Taxi Driver is Tarantino’s favourite Scorsese movie. The ultimate movie nerd once ranked his top 11 favourite movies of all time, listing Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as his favourite, with Rio Bravo, Blow Out, and Taxi Driver tied in second place.
With this in mind, Tarantino was understandably sweating like a glassblowers arse when he first ran into Scorsese. As he revealed in an appearance on Tom Segura’s podcast 2 Bears 1 Cave, Tarantino first met his hero on the set of Casino in 1995. At the time, he already had Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction under his belt, but he was still getting used to his new-found status.
According to Tarantino, the actor Don Rickles announced his arrival on set with the cheeky quip, “Finally, a real director is here.” Flustered by the compliment, Tarantino remembers that he “felt like hiding under the carpet.”
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