Three legendary directors Quentin Tarantino took down a peg: “I have no desire to see another movie”
Quentin Tarantino is perhaps equally famous for on-screen style and his lack of humility behind the camera, known for an array of bold thoughts and opinions on every released project and the landscape of cinema in general. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of film, the director has always been quick to voice his opinions on the projects that he loves, and even quicker to share the ones that he hates.
While he has cited the work of Brian de Palma and Steven Spielberg as influences on his style, he doesn’t hold back from critiquing the work of other directors, making sweeping statements about the most celebrated filmmakers of our time after finding himself disappointed by cinema experiences that didn’t live up to his expectations, dishing out scathing reviews to some our greatest auteurs. But some of them still need taking down a peg or two, and Tarantino is just the man to do it.
While the work of David Lynch holds a special place for many film lovers through his surrealistic dreamscapes and nonsensical narratives, Tarantino dismantled his creative pedestal after the release of his 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, following FBI agents Sam and Chet as they investigate the murder of a small-town waitress called Teresa, with the case being disrupted when Chet mysteriously disappears.
While the Twin Peaks universe is arguably one of Lynch’s crowning achievements, praised for his eerie collaboration with Badalamenti on the score and the strange distortion of suburban life, Tarantino hated the 1992 addition to this story world, saying, “David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.” Imaginably, it would be hard to recover from the review like that, but thankfully, Lynch is so lost in his own world that he probably has no idea.
As well as disliking Lynch, Tarantino has also expressed harsh views on legendary French new wave director Jean Luc Godard. As a film fanatic, the director has endlessly studied the likes of Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou, which has undoubtedly influenced his editing style and experimental splicing of images. However, Tarantino has reflected on his previous love for the auteur and retracted his former admiration, saying, “I’m not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore. I think… Godard is kind of like Frank Frazetta. You get into him for a while and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him and then you outgrow. I think that’s what Godard is, at least for me anyway, as a filmmaker.”
And lastly, Tarantino attempted to take a swipe at the king of filmmaking himself, the great Stanley Kubrick, but I have a sneaky feeling that the petulant Pulp Fiction director is really just a little jealous. A Clockwork Orange is one of Kubrick’s most controversial films, with an exploration of chaos and violence that led the film to become banned after its release.
But despite being known for a similar quality in his own work, Tarantino expressed his dislike of the film and the practices around its production, saying, “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first 20 minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it.”
It seems as though Tarantino can’t wrap his head around the idea of satire and social commentary, which is hardly surprising given the empty meaning behind the use of stylised violence in his own films. But alas, every cinephile has strong feelings about the medium that we love, and while many people might not agree with his words, he has undeniably earned the right to share them.
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