‘The Deer Hunter’: The film Quentin Tarantino called the “best movie ever made”
A discerning convergence of dark comedy, bloody violence, and bold comic book iconography characterises the nine movies crafted by Quentin Tarantino to date. Whether set in a 19th-century haberdashery or 1990s Hollywood, Tarantino’s script and cinematographic style imprints a distinctive identity.
Tarantino has long maintained that his tenth movie would be his last. During an interview with CNN in 2022, he revealed why. “Well, I’ve been doing it for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and it’s time to wrap up the show.”
“Like I said, I’m an entertainer,” he continued. “I want to leave you wanting more, you know, and not just work, and I don’t want to work to diminishing returns. I don’t want to be… one, I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now. And that’s what happens.”
Tarantino’s forthcoming movie, The Movie Critic, will be one of his most personal and realistic creations. While promoting his book Cinema Speculation in April 2023, Tarantino revealed that the titular critic was real, but he declined to specify their identity at this juncture.
“There is a lot of speculation as to who it is based on,” Tarantino observed. “And yes, he is a real critic, but he is not known…and I am not going to tell you more.”
Some fans speculate that the character may, in part, relate to Tarantino himself. From the age of 22, he has been a voracious cinephile and, since rising to prominence, has never neglected to share his opinions in interviews. In fact, interviews are too few and far between, so the director joins Roger Avary frequently to discuss movies on their Video Archives podcast.
Naturally, Tarantino has labelled many movies as favourites, masterpieces and the work of geniuses throughout the years. If we were to distil the auteur’s ultimate, all-time favourite movie, it would probably be Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Like many movie-goers of his generation, Tarantino has a soft spot for 1960s westerns, but countless titles have drawn his attention from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly over the past 50 years. One of the first to do so was Michael Cimino’s gritty Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter.
Starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, this 1979 classic won five Oscars from a total of nine nominations at the 51st Academy Awards ceremony. Remembering 1979 as an enlightening year for cinema in a 2020 appearance on Lynn Hirschberg’s Five Things podcast, Tarantino described The Deer Hunter as an early favourite.
“The Deer Hunter would have been the movie that would have been the movie of the year for me,” Tarantino told Hirschberg. “I thought it was the best movie ever made. I thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen.”
While The Deer Hunter was the most captivating and provocative movie of 1979, Tarantino admitted that, as a teenager at the time, “Rocky II would have been the movie that I enjoyed the most.”
Watch the trailer for The Deer Hunter below.
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