The iconic director Quentin Tarantino called “overrated”
There are few filmmakers as opinionated as Quentin Tarantino. The self-professed movie buff has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema, partly down to spending his early years working in a video rental store. Summing up his commitment to the art form, the director once famously commented: “When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘No, I went to films’.”
Tarantino acquired an impressive knowledge of everything from Hollywood classics to obscure foreign pictures and cult B-movies. This melting pot of influences can be identified in his work, which has moved through genres from crime dramas to martial arts and westerns. Yet, like all great auteurs that Tarantino has looked to for influence, his films possess an idiosyncratic style that is unmistakable.
Tarantino made two westerns back-to-back in the early 2010s with Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, demonstrating his intense love for the genre. Both films paid homage to his favourite westerns, with the title of the former directly lifted from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 movie Django. Franco Nero, who played Django in the original film, even makes a cameo in Tarantino’s movie.
Westerns are one of Tarantino’s favourite genres, and he once revealed his all-time favourites. He said: “If I had to pick my three favourite Westerns, they would be Rio Bravo, number one; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, number two; and One-Eyed Jacks, number three.”
For Tarantino, Sergio Leone is one of the greatest directors, citing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as one of his favourite films of all time, not just one of his most favoured westerns. However, due to the filmmaker’s dedication to the genre, you’d expect him to also be a fan of western champion John Ford. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Tarantino called the Ford, known for movies such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Fort Apache, “overrated” during a past interview with Henry Louis Gates. Tarantino explained: “One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously.”
“To say the least, I hate him,” Tarantino added. “Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that who kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity. And you can see it in the cinema in the thirties and forties—it’s still there. And even in the fifties. The idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms.”
Going as far as to say, “Ford’s photography has always been overrated in my estimation,” Tarantino has made it clear that you won’t find any copies of Ford’s movies in his DVD collection.
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