The genre Quentin Tarantino has no respect for: “It’s going to be a fucking boring movie”
His first three features may have all been crime thrillers in the broadest sense of the word despite their stark differences, but after that, Quentin Tarantino has made a point of expanding his genre horizons.
Reservoir Dogs was a heist flick without a heist, Pulp Fiction was a labyrinthine story with multiple overlapping plotlines, and Jackie Brown was redemption story indebted to blaxploitation. Not the same, obviously, but each of them nonetheless revolved around criminality and double-crosses aplenty.
Since then, the two-time Academy Award winner has branched out significantly, beginning with the roaring rampage of revenge that was Kill Bill. Death Proof was a slasher on four wheels that emerged from the failed Grindhouse experiment before Tarantino upended the reality of World War II with Inglourious Basterds.
Back-to-back Westerns, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight were swiftly joined by his love letter to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which indicates that he’ll be trying something completely different for his tenth and final movie. It won’t be The Movie Critic, at least, but beyond that, every possible door remains open.
Tarantino has helmed several period pieces and ripped up the history books in favour of servicing his own story, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features several semi-fictionalised versions of real people. However, don’t expect him to slavishly recreate anybody’s life story on the screen, because by his own admission, he hates the biographical drama.
“Another genre I have no respect for is the biopic; they are just big excuses for actors to win Oscars,” he told Roger Ebert. “Even the most interesting person, if you are telling their life from beginning to end, it’s going to be a fucking boring movie. If you do this, you have to make comic book versions of their whole life.”
Tarantino has the biopic at the very top of his shitlist alongside the costume drama, which he also called “one of the genres I don’t like.” From his perspective, he can’t think of anything less interesting than watching somebody’s life story unfold chronologically, running through the highs and lows as and when they happened.
That distaste for the conventions of the format was made abundantly clear in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which incorporated the likes of Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, George Spahn, Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, and Mama Cass, to name just a few, but all of them are treated as semi-fictionalised creations who exist in the filmmaker’s bespoke reality where things don’t always turn out as history remembers them.
At one stage, there was even talk that The Movie Critic would be about Pauline Kael before it was scrapped. Tarantino denied it, which makes a lot more sense knowing his feelings on the biopic.
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