The two legendary directors Quentin Tarantino shares a “sibling rivalry” with
Quentin Tarantino has one of the most easily definable styles in modern cinema. His projects almost always contain a combination of the following elements: brutal violence, vengeful motivations, iconic soundtracks, character-focused writing, innumerable expletives, and, usually, a starring role for Samuel L. Jackson.
Within minutes of blindly hitting play on a Tarantino flick, it’s easy to identify him as the director, but his auteurship doesn’t exempt him from comparison or competition. Like all artists, Tarantino’s work has been likened to his peers and to his predecessors. There’s Guy Ritchie, who has a similar penchant for stylistic violence and character-led focus. Then there are the greats who came before Tarantino, the likes of Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick.
The director personally seems to place himself in more direct competition with those filmmakers of the past. While divulging some of his role models in an interview via filmSCHOOLarchive, he named the two directors he considers himself to have a “sibling rivalry” with: Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick. It’s a bold claim to make, placing Tarantino in a rivalry with two of the most iconic directors in cinematic history.
Long before Tarantino began to hone his own auteurship, Welles was securing his place as the defining auteur director through Shakespeare adaptations and all-time greats like Citizen Kane. Welles passed away before Tarantino even sat in a director’s seat, so it’s quite fascinating how Tarantino sees himself as having a “sibling rivalry” with the legendary filmmaker.
Kubrick honed a similarly legendary legacy, honing his own auteur status through his perfectionism and the trademark “Kubrick stare”. From A Clockwork Orange to 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Shining to Full Metal Jacket, few directors have forged a filmography filled to the brim with classics like that. Like Welles, Kubrick established his auteurship long before Kubrick even took his first steps into the world of cinema.
When Kubrick passed away in 1999, Tarantino had just three films to his name. It’s interesting, then, that he sees himself as having a “sibling rivalry” with Welles and Kubrick rather than any of his actual contemporaries. He’s certainly not in direct competition with either director, so perhaps this feeling of competition comes from their fellow status as auteurs.
Like the legendary directors who came before him, Tarantino has carved out a style for himself that has become almost synonymous with his name. In the same way that peculiar camera angles became characteristic of Welles’ style, and the Kubrick stare became the director’s trademark, Tarantino has committed to a collection of stylistic choices that have come to delineate his directing.
The filmmaker’s bold statement also, perhaps, indicates his ambitions in the industry. Rather than seeing himself in competition with his peers, he sees himself as competing with the all-time greats. He doesn’t want to just be one of the best directors of his generation, making films that define the 1990s and the 2000s. He wants to be one of the defining directors in cinematic history. He wants to be considered among the pantheon of the greatest filmmakers. He wants them to see him as a brother in artistic arms.
As films like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill creep into lists of the greatest films of all time, amongst the likes of Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it seems like his ambitions might not be so unrealistic. As one of the most distinctive auteurs in modern cinema, he’s well on his way to securing a legacy akin to Kubrick’s or to Welles’.
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