Every time Quentin Tarantino called an acting performance “one of the best” he’s ever seen
Every filmmaker is prone to the odd bout of hyperbole, whether they’re discussing one of their movies or the work of another, but few have made it a part of their personality to quite the same extent as Quentin Tarantino, whose enthusiasm often gets the better of him.
There are several stone-cold cinematic masterpieces that he doesn’t rate in the slightest, even going so far as to suggest that anyone who disagrees with him is talking bollocks, just like there are many inarguably terrible pictures that he’ll defend to the death as unheralded gems that deserve their flowers.
As the old saying goes, opinions are indeed like arseholes, and everyone has one. On the other side of that argument, Tarantino has gained a reputation for having more outspoken opinions than most people in Hollywood, and it’s not a stretch to say that he runs the risk of becoming one of its biggest arseholes by extension, especially for those dyed-in-the-wool Paul Dano fans out there.
One thing that remains true of the two-time Academy Award winner, from Reservoir Dogs to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is that he knows how to coax a top-drawer performance out of his cast. Whatever issues anyone may have with his output, what we can all agree in is that the only person guaranteed to deliver bad acting in a Quentin Tarantino flick is Quentin Tarantino.
Strangely, considering his decades-long love of patting himself on the back, the writer and director has never described any turns in his nine features as among the greatest he’s ever seen. He rates many of them highly, but not as highly as the quartet or performances he’s described in such lavish verbiage.
Tarantino used to use Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo as the barometer of whether or not a burgeoning romantic relationship had a future, so if his would-be paramour didn’t agree that “Dean Martin gives one of the greatest performances ever made” opposite John Wayne, then that second date probably wouldn’t happen.
He’s a lifelong disciple of both Brian De Palma and John Travolta, so it was only natural that he was adamant the latter “gives one of the greatest performances of all time” in the former’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out, a movie that made a lasting impression on the video store worker turned generation-defining filmmaker.
Arthur Hiller’s 1971 comedy The Hospital won an Oscar for its Paddy Chayefsky-penned screenplay, but the film would be nothing without George C Scott’s bravura performance as the beleaguered chief of medicine, Herb Bock, which Tarantino surmised as “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Last, and by all means least, since the film was a slog from its first frame to the last, he used almost identical terminology to sum up Joaquin Phoenix’s reprisal of his Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie à Deux, going against the grain to call it “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life.” Again, those are his opinions, and he’s allowed to have them, even if some hold more water than others.
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