Why Martin Scorsese thinks he’ll never match Quentin Tarantino
In the glorious, strange, and ever-twisting world of modern cinema, some names ring out louder than others, and only a person living on the dark side of the moon would be unaware of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, the two eternally burning stars of contemporary American cinema with respective legacies of genuine brilliance.
Scorsese has countless masterpiece movies to his name, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, and while Tarantino is some years his junior, he’s equally made some serious contributions to the medium of film with modern classics like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds.
The pair have a distinct admiration for one another’s often violent, intense and criminal-focused work, but remarkably, there is one creative facet in which Scorsese believes he would never be able to match Tarantino. It all comes down to the roles each director holds as a creative, with Tarantino being equally adept with pen as he is with camera.
“[Tarantino is] a writer… it’s a different thing,” Scorsese once told The Associated Press. “I come up with stories, I get attracted to stories through other people — all different means, different ways. And so I think it’s a different process. I respect writers, and I wish I could just be in a room and create these novels. Not films; novels. Long stories.”
It’s fair to say that Tarantino does indeed transcend the limits of the movie director and embodies the spirit of a writer. Not only did he rewrite his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood into a novelisation, but his work as a screenwriter – for others’ films as well as his own – is well regarded across the movie industry.
Scorsese, on the other hand, heralded as he is, tends to lean into the stories of others, often adapting novels and real-life narratives into some of the best works of cinema of all time. There’s certainly an element of modesty in the iconic director when he says he’s unable to do what Tarantino does, but it’s also true that there are striking differences in their respective creative approaches.
Tarantino once explained the “personal” nature of his films, telling The Telegraph and referring to his film Inglorious Basterds, “People who really know me can see that in my work. In a film, I may be talking about a bomb in a theatre, but that’s not what I’m really talking about.”
The film icon went one further when talking to The Hollywood Reporter and explained his seeming addiction to writing and how that can create an issue all of its own. “My problem is not writer’s block,” he said. “My problem is I can’t stop writing. And when you’re writing movies, that’s not the greatest problem to have. I can tend to go long.”
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