The 2014 movie that made Quentin Tarantino want to punch “directors who don’t give a shit” in the face
There are many things more terrifying than the idea of having Quentin Tarantino threaten to punch you in the face, with his declaration of violence born entirely from one of his peers’ fondness for the old days.
It’s as hyperbolic as you’d expect from a filmmaker who loves to exaggerate for dramatic effect, but it’s still a perspective rooted in his love of cinema, as opposed to making wanton threats for the sake of it, not that Tarantino has been immune from those, either.
He once got into a scrap with producer Don Murphy and bragged about it on national television, which didn’t go too well when the inevitable lawsuit was filed, and he called out Disney for flexing its corporate muscles and pushing The Hateful Eight off select screens in favour of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as if Hollywood isn’t a place driven entirely by cold, hard cash and the films that stand to make the most of it.
As an auteur, sci-fi has never been Tarantino’s thing, and fool on anyone who actually thought he’d end up directing an R-rated Star Trek flick. As a viewer, though, he’s much more partial, even if he sounded a touch too partial to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar when he was caught reflecting on the 2014 epic using no green screens in favour of location shooting, miniatures, and projection.
“It’s actually old filmmaking craft,” he marvelled, with Tarantino and Nolan two of the highest-profile directors who’ve sworn they’ll never make the switch to digital. The same year Interstellar was released, the pair, along with JJ Abrams and others, effectively saved 35mm shooting when they banded together to ensure Kodak, the last remaining manufacturer, was able to stay in the game.
Interstellar was, unsurprisingly, shot largely on 35mm and 65mm Kodak film, with Tarantino anointing Nolan as one of the good guys. “He’s calling up directors who don’t give a shit, and dealing with their apathy, and trying to explain to them how important it is,” the two-time Oscar-winner raged. “I would want to punch them in the fucking face.”
A very Tarantinoesque response to someone holding a different viewpoint from him on the best way to shoot a movie, but Nolan wouldn’t stoop to those levels, and he knows it, with the heel-dragger noting that, “Being British, he actually rises above all of that and tries to be diplomatic about it,” a situation he’d clearly rather handle with a quick sock to the jaw.
In fact, it was in the summer of 2014, mere months before Interstellar arrived in cinemas, that the Dark Knight trilogy mastermind spearheaded his attempt to save Kodak’s celluloid division from oblivion, and what better way to prove its relevance than with a $165 million production that earned over a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office and won an Academy Award from five nominations?
As long as Nolan and Tarantino are around, they won’t let shooting on film go extinct, even if the former is doing a much better job than the latter on that front, since it’s been six years since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and he’s no closer to getting that tenth and final feature of his in front of the cameras.
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