“My artistic journey comes first”: The directors Quentin Tarantino wants to emulate on his “climb to immortality”
There are few people more enthralled by the legend of Quentin Tarantino than Quentin Tarantino himself, which has placed the writer and director in a rather sticky wicket of his own making.
For years, Tarantino has been adamant that once he releases his tenth and final feature, he’s done. Ever since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the pressure has been ratcheting up because everyone knows that the next one is going to be his last. Or so he claims, at least.
It may have been simpler for Tarantino to go ahead and make another movie before informing the world after the fact it was his swansong, and scrapping The Movie Critic after deciding it wasn’t fit for purpose as his fond farewell to the world of cinema indicates that the burden is beginning to grow.
He’s undoubtedly one of the greatest and most famous auteurs of the modern era, but if his next film isn’t one of the best ever made, then there’s going to be disappointment. It’s been built up to such mythic proportions that only something truly special will do, but Tarantino has always been very cognisant of how he wants to be remembered.
Before he became a father of two, Tarantino referred to having a healthy bank balance, a wife, and children as “those kind of things that get in the way,” and he wasn’t of the mindset to round out his career “working with compromised intentions” as he put it because legacy was at the forefront of his thinking.
“My filmography comes first,” he admitted to GQ. “My artistic journey comes first.” That stance has surely softened since he had kids of his own, but the two-time Academy Award winner was so preoccupied with focusing all of his energies on cinema that he didn’t see a world where he could balance the two.
“But there is an excitement when you’re hanging on the next film of a director as they’re doing their climb to immortality,” he suggested, referring to the legions of cinephiles eagerly awaiting his next movie before confessing he’s been in that exact boat. “I felt that way about De Palma in the ’70s and the ’80s. I felt that way about Scorsese in the ’70s and the ’80s, and I felt that way about Spielberg in the ’70s and ’80s.”
In those two decades alone De Palma helmed Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and The Untouchables, while Scorsese knocked out Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy, not to mention Spielberg’s Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET the Extra-Terrestrial, which is only limiting it to four apiece.
Having been responsible for Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill in the 1990s and 2000s, Tarantino has already enjoyed a similarly-lauded run, but immortality is a lot harder to achieve and something very few filmmakers will ever be lucky enough to attain.
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