The “jaw-dropping” insult that made Quentin Tarantino an enemy of John Carpenter: “How dare he do that?”
Even though he’s nestled quite comfortably in the middle of the Venn diagram between John Carpenter and Kurt Russell, Quentin Tarantino still managed to piss off the legendary director.
Carpenter loves Russell, and they’ve made multiple movies together. Meanwhile, Tarantino loves Russell, and they’ve also made multiple movies together. To cap it all off, Tarantino also loves Carpenter, with Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight both indebted to the genre maestro’s classic, The Thing.
Russell even called Death Proof the best John Carpenter film that John Carpenter didn’t direct, so it goes without saying the two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and outspoken auteur has a soft spot for the Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and Halloween legend’s oeuvre.
Underlining that point even more, when Tarantino recruited the inimitable Ennio Morricone to compose some new music for The Hateful Eight, several familiar cues from The Thing were also worked into the picture’s soundscape, which continued to tie everything up in a neat little Carpenter-centric bow.
Of course, the Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director pilfering other films and repurposing their musical moments is something he’s been doing for decades, but when Carpenter seemingly stumbled across one of the auteur’s stylistic signatures, he was aghast.
“My shock at seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,” he remarked. “At the opening of the movie, it was the ‘Green Leaves of Summer’ from The Alamo. It’s like, you gotta be kidding me! Fuck you! You actually took a piece of music from another movie? How cheap! And then playing some incidental music from Kelly’s Heroes!”
In his defence, Tarantino claimed he had no idea that the track was from John Wayne’s ‘Best Picture’-nominated directorial debut, maintaining that he’d never actually seen The Alamo, but used the tune because it was a frequent needle-drop in the Hong Kong action flicks he’d grown up devouring.
He’s been doing it for his entire career, but it remained an aspect of his filmmaking that Carpenter was completely oblivious to. When he discovered that Tarantino was, in fact, Hollywood’s ultimate magpie, he couldn’t believe it. “It was jaw-dropping,” he raged. “I was insulted. How dare he do that?”
Weirdly, as much as that got under his skin, he didn’t seem to mind when it happened to him. When Carpenter was asked how some of Morricone’s compositions made it from The Thing to The Hateful Eight, he simply said he had “no clue,” but if you do it to The Alamo, he’ll be fucking raging, apparently.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.