The director Quentin Tarantino calls “a fucking revelation”
From an early age, Quentin Tarantino had his sights set on becoming a filmmaker. Indulging in countless titles from a wide range of genres, it didn’t take long for the young Tarantino to start penning his own scripts. To maintain as close proximity to the art form as possible, he worked in a video store while continuing to write movies, and finally, he found success.
Reservoir Dogs allowed Tarantino to enter the industry with a bang. It was a shocking film, made independently yet with notable names, such as Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth, in starring roles. The dialogue was incredibly witty and unforgettable, the violence was tenfold, and classic hits such as Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ became irrevocably associated with a darkly humorous torture scene.
From there, Tarantino became an indie darling, one of cinema’s most talked-about names. He created Pulp Fiction next while also earning writing credits for projects like True Romance and Natural Born Killers. These days, Tarantino is well-known by cinephiles and casual movie-goers alike, although his work constantly divides audiences due to its brutal nature.
As Tarantino entered the 2010s, he made two movies that paid homage to a genre he had always loved: westerns. Until this point, he had never explicitly dipped his toes into the genre as a filmmaker, but his love for movies by the likes of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci soon led him to create hits such as Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.
In fact, Tarantino once called Corbucci “one of the greatest western directors who ever lived”. On the Video Archives podcast, he gushed about his love for the filmmaker, whose influence is more than apparent in Tarantino’s work, especially his westerns. His love for the auteur is so potent that he even named Django Unchained after Corbucci’s Django and placed many references to the movie in it, including a cameo from Franco Nero, the actor who played the titular character in Corbucci’s film. Calling the work a “fucking revelation”, he highly praised its “atmosphere”, which has deeply inspired the way he has composed his own sets.
Tarantino also labelled Corbucci “one of the great action filmmakers who ever lived,” continuing, “he’s at the tip-top of the action filmmaking game,” which he called “the most cinematic game a director can do”. Highlighting the fact that Corbucci seemed to utilise a sense of “effortlessness,” Tarantino called him “prolific”.
Additionally, he compared him to one of his other favourite filmmakers, Leone, believing Corbucci’s movies to be a bit more “down and dirty”. Tarantino explained, “There is nobody who specialised in doing westerns that committed to as surreal, as cynical, as so realistically violent a West as the westerns of Sergio Corbucci.”
Listen to Tarantino’s thoughts on Corbucci below.
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