The greatest British movie of the 21st century, according to Quentin Tarantino: “Hands down my favourite”
Even though he’s always been known as one of the industry’s most passionate and vociferous cinephiles who knows everything about movies that most people have never heard of, Quentin Tarantino isn’t as well known for celebrating the merits of the United Kingdom’s filmic output.
That’s not to say that he’s spent his life actively ignoring British movies or operating under the impression that most of them are shite, but rarely will he talk about a picture from the opposite side of the Atlantic in the same reverential tones he’ll use to describe a 1970s exploitation flick that played for two weeks in a handful of drive-in theatres before being lost to the sands of time.
Obviously, he’s American, so he’s not obliged to do deep dives on the past, present, and future of Britain’s industry, never mind the cavalcade of classics, seminal masterpieces, pivotal touchstones, cult favourites, and overlooked gems the nation has been churning out since the moving image was invented.
Then again, the two-time Academy Award winner sounded fairly adamant that Peppa Pig was the greatest export of the last decade, which is quite the statement to make, considering he’s a guy who’s been obsessed with movies for his entire life and decided that an animated series about an anthropomorphised family of swine was the pinnacle of British film and television’s international expansion.
With that in mind, if Tarantino were to settle on one movie as the best to have emerged from those shores since the early 1990s, which he did, it would make sense for it to be something close to his heart. Knowing what he likes, something packed with, say, comedy, blood, guts, entrails, and occasional profanity seems like it would be right up his street, which it was.
“Hands down, my favourite British movie that has come out since I’ve been making movies is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead,” he announced. What a surprise: It’s a blood-soaked genre film inspired by blood-soaked genre films, co-written and directed by a filmmaker who grew up watching and adoring blood-soaked genre films.
Suffice to say, Wright’s sophomore effort from behind the camera is hardly The Remains of the Day, but it’s still British to its core. It’s also a modern great, so while it might sound hyperbolic or typically Tarantinoesque for the auteur to call a romantic comedy with zombies the single best movie to have been made in the UK since at least 1992, when Reservoir Dogs was released, he’s not talking out of his arse.
More than 20 years later, and Shaun of the Dead remains as endlessly rewatchable as ever, and it opened up doors for Wright and his cohorts that they’ve been walking through ever since. Is it a classic? Not in the conventional sense of the word, as you’d apply it to something like Lawrence of Arabia or The Red Shoes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not.
It also served as the catalyst for the long and beautiful friendship between Tarantino and Wright, but even if there’s a whiff of favouritism about it, that doesn’t invalidate his opinion.
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