Better than Welles and Kubrick: the director Quentin Tarantino called his favourite genius
Despite having an easily identifiable style that’s entirely his own, Quentin Tarantino developed his signature aesthetic by picking and choosing the aspects and elements he loved from the work of his favourite directors.
It makes for an eclectic bunch of influences, but that’s part of the reason why a Tarantino movie is so distinctive. On a technical or artistic level, he hasn’t come close to reinventing the wheel, but that myriad of inspirations was nonetheless distilled down into something the influx of facsimiles to follow in the wake of Pulp Fiction proved beyond doubt was inimitable.
Not that he’s ever fawned over every established legend, though, with the two-time Academy Award winner having an open disdain for the likes of David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock. However, on the opposite side of the fence, the filmmakers he’s cited as inspirations are as varied as anyone would expect from a genre-hopping auteur like Tarantino.
He’s cherrypicked from Brian De Palma, John Woo, Mario Bava, Pedro Almodóvar, and more, hoping to emulate the trajectories of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He adores Jean-Pierre Melville but remains split on Francois Truffaut, but he’s never been one to throw the term ‘genius’ around lightly.
That being said, he did bestow it upon John Carpenter, which is indicative of Tarantino’s wide-ranging tastes. Not many stuffy scholars would consider the guy who made Halloween and The Thing as being a cinematic genius, but the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs creator most certainly would.
Carpenter wasn’t at the head of the back, however, and neither were Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick. They made the cut, but when Roger Ebert inquired over how heavily the shadow of Josef von Sternberg loomed over his cross-continental World War II adventure Inglourious Basterds, the transformative director earned special praise.
“I have to admit to coming to von Sternberg very late in life,” he said. “First, by reading a book about him, which made me seek out his films for study. Then, his autobiography, which is, I think, one of the finest critical books of cinema art and its limitations ever written. Now I consider that of the cinema geniuses like Kubrick and Welles, my favourite genius is von Sternberg.”
The most obvious homage in Inglourious Basterds is Diane Kruger’s Bridget Von Hammersmark, evocative of von Sternberg’s famous collaborations with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. It may not have been the direct inspiration for the character, but when Tarantino admitted, “I gave Kruger the von Sternberg treatment” in the movie, it’s hard to argue.
The best way to gauge whether or not a director deserves to be called a genius is to look at the state of cinema before and after their career. Did von Sternberg pioneer and popularise several techniques and filmmaking tactics that became commonplace and regular practice from that point on? Yes, he did. Not only does he fit the bill, but for Tarantino, he was the pinnacle.
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