Is this Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movie of all time?
The most complicated question for any cinema fan to answer is their favourite film. Whittling countless masterpieces into just one work is nearly impossible, so when you’re Quentin Tarantino, one of the biggest cinephiles to ever live, that question is made all the more difficult.
After all, how can just one movie sum up everything we love about the medium, containing all the pleasures, horrors, joys and sorrows that make a film such an intoxicating and essential experience? Tarantino has one of the most comprehensive and profound knowledge of cinema history, so he’d find it challenging to pick out just one favourite picture.
Over the years, the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director has gone on record countless times to discuss the movies that he admires most, those that inspire him, or films that he considers guilty pleasures. We know full well that he’s a big fan of the crime genre, with previous mentions of Michael Mann’s Thief and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out coming in with solid contentions of being Tarantino’s favourite.
He’s also a massive fan of Japanese cinema. The director has spoken glowingly of the samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, just as he’s expressed his admiration for some European greats like Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Luc Godard. But none of them seems to stand up to what may well be Tarantino’s top choice.
Of all the countless movies that he’s watched and studied over the years, it looks as though Tarantino’s ultimate favourite movie is Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. During an interview with The Talks, Tarantino admitted that his favourite films might differ daily, but he “always” selects Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western.
The Good, the Bad and The Ugly is the third and final instalment in Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, preceded by A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. It sees Clint Eastwood once again play the drifter known as ‘The Man With No Name’, although he is referred to throughout the movie as ‘Blondie’.
Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach also star in Leone’s classic western, while the cinematography of Tonino Delli Colli has been widely praised, as has Ennio Morricone’s excellent score. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly features some of the most tense and violent moments in Western cinema and sees three gunslingers fight to find a buried treasure of Confederate gold during the American Civil War.
The film stands out for Tarantino amongst all his other favourites because Leone has been so influential in the creation of his own movies. He once claimed: “The one artist that I think has been the most influential to me in my work has got to be Sergio Leone. That kind of half-assed operatic quality, the way the music takes over, and his way of directing via set pieces a lot of the time. I think he is the filmmaker who you can spot the most in my work.”
Tarantino, of course, loves many of Leone’s movies, most notably the earlier parts of the Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in America, but it’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that seems to pip the others to the post in the race for his favourite of all time, proven by the simple words, “My favourite movie of all time is The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”
When asked why, the director stated, “Because it’s the greatest cinematic achievement in the history of cinema.” Tarantino has spoken so highly of so many films throughout his career that it can feel like every movie is his favourite, but when the push comes to shove, there can only be one winner, and that champion is undoubtedly Leone’s 1966 epic spaghetti western.
Check out the trailer for Tarantino’s favourite movie, Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, below.
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