“He entertains an audience no matter what”: the director Quentin Tarantino called the “Korean Spielberg”
There are plenty of directors out there who’d love to emulate Steven Spielberg’s career, but even though Quentin Tarantino isn’t one of them, that doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate the filmmakers who remind him of the legendary auteur.
Based solely on the fact that he’s the single highest-grossing director in cinema history and the only one with a $10 billion filmography, it’s an indisputable fact that no filmmaker has managed to speak to the widest possible audience in a variety of different ways to anywhere near the same extent as Spielberg.
He’s crafted intimate dramas, intensely personal passion projects, sweeping fantasies, jaw-dropping sci-fi, rollicking adventures, biopics, crime capers, and comedies, all of which retain the themes and motifs that have been integral to his incredible success since the very beginning.
Not all of his movies have been winners, sure, but there’s nobody who does engrossing escapism better than Spielberg on top form. The sense of wonderment, awe-inspiring spectacle, detail-orientated storytelling, and character-driven drama set against lavish backdrops have been the strongest weapon in his arsenal for over 50 years, with Spielbergian an accepted part of the cinematic lexicon.
He’s one of a kind, but for Tarantino’s money, there’s one director from the other side of the world who’s come close without sacrificing their identity. “I also love Bong Joon-ho, the guy who did The Host,” he told Total Film. “To me, he’s like the Korean Spielberg.”
“I’ve seen people try to duplicate what they think is Spielberg’s thing, alright, but it’s actually the inner workings of his sense of humour, how he entertains an audience no matter what the subject is,” Tarantino continued. “That’s the inner workings of Spielberg, and Joon-ho has that, even in a downer, true-life story like Memories of Murder.”
Using the two examples Tarantino highlighted, it’s easy to see what he’s getting at. The Host might be an effects-heavy creature feature in the broadest sense, but it’s also rooted deeply in the socio-political and economic issues that plagued Joon-ho’s native Korea at the time it was made, with the filmmaker using a real-life incident as the jumping-off point for a fantastical flick that carried plenty of thematic weight.
Similarly, Memories of Murder is a serial killer thriller indebted to harrowing real-life events, but the film has plenty of pathos, poignancy, and unexpected lashings of laugh-out-loud humour to accompany its traumatic subject matter. It’s a hard tightrope to walk, and as much as Spielberg has mastered it, Joon-ho has yet to fall off, either.
Tarantino anointed Joon-ho as Korea’s very own Spielberg before he’d even made noir thriller Mother, self-contained dystopian sci-fi Snowpierecer, the environmentally-conscious adventure Okja, or the mesmeric dark comedy Parasite, and while all of those films are entirely reflective of their creator’s unique vision, they’re nonetheless in keeping with the Pulp Fiction architect’s definition of what it means to be Spielbergian.
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