The first filmmaker to show Quentin Tarantino what a director does: “I was like, wow”
When the big book of Hollywood directors is eventually written, there will be at least one chapter devoted to the life and times of Quentin Tarantino. The maverick auteur isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but most people can agree that, objectively, he knows what he’s doing. His dedication to the craft of filmmaking, fuelled by an intense passion for cinema, is second to none, and his projects are always beautifully shot and innovatively presented, even if the subject matter can be somewhat divisive.
All great directors start out like everybody else, as a viewer. Most are obsessed with film from a young age, drinking in movies like water and indirectly learning from the biggest names of their respective eras. Tarantino is no exception, as he explained to Charlie Rose in 1994. One name in particular stood out as an early inspiration, one that would have a profound effect on his career going forward.
“Sergio Leone was a big influence on me,” Tarantino said. Born in Italy, Leone is best known for pioneering the ‘spaghetti western’, a take on the traditional cowboy movie inspired by an outsider’s view of the genre. Through the likes of Once Upon a Time in the West and the legendary ‘Dollars’ trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name, the maestro completely reinvented the Western and set the stage for pretty much every big-budget successor over the next half-century.
Tarantino is a massive Western fan. He’s made two of them, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, and written and spoken at great length about the subject in various essays and interviews. It wasn’t just the content of Leone’s films that spoke to him, however, it was their presentation. “He was like the first… director where I… started like really thinking about becoming a filmmaker, where I was like, wow, I mean well that’s a director. That’s, that’s a film that’s directed,” Tarantino continued. “His films are so stylized… and you could even like watch the whole filmmaking process, you know, I mean, if you’re thinking along those lines.”
By combining established Western tropes with the emerging New Wave style and traditional European art film techniques, Leone created an entirely new subset of film. He is best known for his mixture of long shots to establish place and scale and close-up to convey subtle emotion on his actors’ faces. He could go from an extreme wide angle on a sparse desert plain to a tight angle on the eyes of his hero and make it look seamless.
A Fistful of Dollars came out in 1964, the year after Tarantino was born. By the time he was a teenager, Leone’s most influential work was old news, but would have likely still be repeated on television or passed around via word of mouth. Discovering someone like Leone, who was able to craft exciting stories whilst leaving his own recognisable mark on screen, must have been like a light going off in Tarantino’s head. He aspired to do the exact same thing when he was first starting out, leading to many critics writing about him in the same way they had written about his hero several decades earlier.
Though he’s come a long way since he first discovered spaghetti Westerns, Tarantino’s love for Leone is still on full display. In 2019, as part of a foreword for Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece by Christopher Frayling, he described him, “the greatest of all Italy’s filmmakers.”
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