Five directors who hated Quentin Tarantino
There’s no doubt that ever since he first burst onto the film scene in 1992 with his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has established himself as one of the most prominent filmmakers in American cinema, going on to deliver what many people in the film industry consider to be masterpiece works of a true auteur.
With the likes of Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to his name, it’s easy to see why so many industry figures and audience members hold the California-born director in such high esteem. However, it’s also true that Tarantino’s films are not everyone’s cup of tea, with some finding them to be slightly one-dimensional in nature.
After all, Tarantino has his own ubiquitous style, narratives of criminal enterprise with a heavy lean towards excessive violence and profanity. As such, the Hollywood icon has drawn a notable amount of criticism from those who feel that his insistence on overly bloody scenes and words of a racial nature goes too far.
For that reason, and many others, Tarantino has often found himself on the receiving end of the same kind of verbal bashing that the filmmaker has given out from time to time. The Pulp Fiction director is, actually, perhaps the most vocal film critic of all time. Regularly taking an opportunity to lambast some of the most celebrated movies and directors around. So it’s only right he has a taste of his own medicine from time to time.
Here, we’re looking at five of Tarantino’s fellow movie directors who have previously expressed their hatred for him, from his contemporaries in the American film industry to, sadly, some of his European cinema heroes. So strap in, and let’s point the finger for once at one of the most championed filmmakers in recent times.
Five directors who hate Quentin Tarantino:
Nick Broomfield
It’s fair to say that the films of Tarantino are over-the-top in terms of their depiction of violence and, to a degree, sex. While this is enjoyed by most of the director’s audience, QT’s fellow filmmaker Nick Broomfield, known for his influential documentaries examining political angles like South African apartheid, does not find his work amusing.
“It’s like watching a schoolboy’s fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Quentin Tarantino would be wanking alone to in his bedroom while this mother is making his baked beans downstairs,” Broomfield rather brilliantly said before pointing out Tarantino’s relationship with his frequent producer: “Only this time he’s got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it’s on at a million screens.”
It might feel like sour grapes, but there is a serious point behind Broomfield’s words, even if they do feel a little jaded.
Michael Haneke
Another movie auteur who does not have a taste for Tarantino’s love of violence on screen is Funny Games and Cache director Michael Haneke. The former film is itself a rather harrowing watch, but Haneke feels that Tarantino takes it too far, particularly in his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, which is admittedly brutal in its physical approach.
“I remember when Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction came out, and I was sitting in a matinee filled with young people,” Haneke once noted. “The famous scene of a boy’s head being blown off caused a huge commotion in the theater. They thought it was great and they almost died laughing. I was upset because I think it’s irresponsible.”
Clearly, the Austrian director feels there is a responsibility for filmmakers to depict violence responsibly, a measure that Tarantino in no way adheres to. It was a regular response from many filmmakers of the day, but that was always part of Tarantino’s charm.
Spike Lee
The feud between Tarantino and Do the Right Thing director Spike Lee is well-documented, and it all comes down to Tarantino’s liberal use of the ‘n-word’ in a number of his films like Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and certainly Django Unchained, the latter of which Lee has criticised at length, and for good reason.
After all, Tarantino seems to use the word to an excessive and unnecessary degree, which has certainly riled up Lee and sparked an ongoing battle between the two filmmakers. “I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively,” Lee once noted. “And some people speak that way. But, Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want? To be made an honorary black man?”
It’s hard to know whether this quarrel has ever died down, but one thing is for sure, it hasn’t and likely will never stop the way Tarantino makes movies.
Oliver Stone
One person who is no stranger to violence in their films, though, is Oliver Stone, who handled Natural Born Killers and Platoon. Even so, Stone harbours a distaste for his fellow cinema icon, and it all comes down to the former film, starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis and Robert Downey Jr, and a writing credit that Tarantino holds, seeing as he wrote the original story.
However, Stone was not happy with merely directing Natural Born Killers and made several revisions to the script, leading to Tarantino trying to release the original as a paperback and a subsequent lawsuit from the producers. Stone refuted Tarantino’s criticisms and claimed that the Reservoir Dogs director was paid “a lot of money” for his effort, pointing out the fact that Tarantino hadn’t even watched the movie and was “saying stuff about my films,” adding, “It was just outrageous”.
Perhaps Tarantino had the last laugh on this one, though, noting, “I hated that fucking movie.”
Jean-Luc Godard
The final selection here is a bit of a tragic one, seeing as Tarantino is known to be a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard’s work, even naming his production company A Band Apart after the French director’s 1964 New Wave film Bande à part. Godard responded to the news with the following damning statement, “I think his work is null. He chose the title of one of my worst films to name his production company. That doesn’t surprise me at all”.
Godard went one further on the matter, adding elsewhere, “Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He’d have done better to give me some money.” The French filmmaker had referred to Tarantino as a “faquin”, meaning a “low or dishonest person”.
Evidently, the disrespect Tarantino received from one of his favourite filmmakers turned him against his hero, as he later stated, “I’m not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore. You get into him for a while and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him and then you outgrow.” But these words were likely said out of shame, let’s face it.
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