“My hero to emulate”: how Bob Dylan inspired the career Quentin Tarantino
Growing up as an avid cinephile, Quentin Tarantino always knew he wanted to make a career out of filmmaking, but it was a musical icon who offered one of his greatest sources of inspiration.
Hollywood is a notoriously difficult place to break into, but once Tarantino achieved it with effortless ease after his debut feature Reservoir Dogs became a word-of-mouth sensation on the independent scene, he realised very early on that he didn’t want to run the risk of trapping himself in a box.
While his first three films were all crime thrillers, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown couldn’t have been more different from Reservoir Dogs in terms of their tone, structure, and execution. Sure, there are recurring themes and motifs in all of them because that’s what auteurs do, but it never felt like Tarantino was returning to overly familiar ground just for the sake of it.
Since then, he’s indulged his love of international action cinema in Kill Bill, paid tribute to exploitation and penned an ode to the slasher in Grindhouse and Death Proof, respectively, put his own spin on World War II with Inglourious Basterds, tackled the revisionist western in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, before writing a love letter to Los Angeles through the rose-tinted lens of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
It may not be a concerted or deliberate plan when Tarantino has always been driven by his feverish imagination to a greater degree than intentionally pinballing from genre to genre, but neither is it a coincidence he looked to one of pop culture’s masters of longevity and reinvention as somebody he wanted to try and emulate.
Tarantino grew up around soul music, but once he met the woman he called his “first real love-of-my-life girlfriend,” he had a eureka moment. “And she was a big Bob Dylan fan,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then all of a sudden I thought, ‘I want to be to film what Bob Dylan was to music’. Bob Dylan kind of became my hero to emulate, just in a different medium.”
The connection between them has remained strong, with Dylan’s name being invoked when he was describing the early work of Jean-Luc Godard, and he even sent him the screenplay for Death Proof for approval. That being said, even the supremely confident Tarantino knew there was a limit to his ambition.
“I don’t know if I’m going to do it,” he said of becoming cinema’s very own Dylan. “I don’t know if I’m going to get there with it, but that’s the goal.” He’s only got one more movie left before calling it quits, so if anything, time is of the essence for Tarantino to live up to his lofty aspirations.
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