The one director Quentin Tarantino called the best since Sergio Leone: “He’s such a hero”
It’s no secret that Quentin Tarantino’s favourite director of all time has always been and always will be Sergio Leone. Even when his tastes shift, his preferences evolve, and his list of favourite movies introduces or removes new contenders, the mastermind behind the Dollars trilogy remains a constant.
The two-time Academy Award winner has spoken fondly of many filmmakers, including Brian De Palma, Jean-Pierre Melville, Mario Bava, and Jean-Luc Godard, before they became embroiled in a bizarre feud when they started slating each other in public, but Leone has always been on a pedestal to himself.
If Tarantino were pressed to name his favourite Leone flick, he’d opt for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If he were pressed to name his favourite movie in general, it would also be The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If he were pressed to name his favourite shot from cinema history, it’s from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
It goes without saying that Leone’s 1968 masterpiece has had a bigger effect, impact, and influence on Tarantino than any other movie, so he wouldn’t throw out direct comparisons between his filmmaking idol and another auteur if he didn’t think they could back it up. The Dollars trilogy figurehead didn’t even specialise in the action genre, but that didn’t stop Tarantino from invoking his name when celebrating the gun-wielding majesty of John Woo anyway.
“I mean, he’s such a hero. He’s making the best action films, bar none, since Sergio Leone,” Tarantino said at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival. “He’s reinventing the genre there in Hong Kong.” He couldn’t have been more correct at the time, with Woo fresh off a remarkable hot streak that yielded A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled within a few years.
In a tantalising tease of something that never came to pass, the Reservoir Dogs wunderkind revealed that he was planning to write a script for Woo to direct that would serve as his Hollywood debut. “I think I have a few things I could give to him, and he could have a mother lode to give to me,” he remarked. “Also, I would take the responsibility of bringing John Woo into the American market unfiltered.”
He envisioned putting their heads together to create something that wasn’t “a halfway John Woo or a John Woo for American audiences, but the John Woo for the people who love John Woo and who John Woo wants to be.” Instead, the world got Hard Target.
Woo wanted to cast Kurt Russell as the lead of his first American feature and ended up with Jean-Claude Van Damme, while the studio peered over his shoulder throughout production. The end result was a modestly successful and so-so shoot ’em up, which was a crushing disappointment for anyone who’d been following the director’s career in his native Hong Kong.
A team-up between Woo and Tarantino was a match made in 1990s action movie heaven, and apart from the preposterous highs of Face/Off, the filmmaker’s detour to the United States failed to justify those Leone comparisons.
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