The independent movie Quentin Tarantino said “knocked it out of the park”
In the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino announced himself as the new darling of American cinema. His debut feature movie Reservoir Dogs, starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen, showed the world that Tarantino was a serious talent, one that would stick around for years to come.
Over the next decade or so, Tarantino delivered some truly brilliant works, including Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. However, the legendary director might never have been inspired to do such brilliant works if it weren’t for a very special independent movie of the 1980s, the Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple.
Presenting the film on Sky Movies, Tarantino spoke of his impressions of Blood Simple and how it inspired him to become a filmmaker. “One of the things about that movie was that it was a very influential movie to me,” he said. “Usually, there’s a movie that comes out in the independent circles that will inspire you as a filmmaker, make you want to do something like that, and make it seem like it’s possible.”
Tarantino went on to explain that around the time he was hoping to become a director, there had been a handful of indie films that had usually inspired his generation to pick up the camera, including Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape.
However, the one “that really knocked it out of the park like, ‘Bam, I could really do something like that,’” for Tarantino was Blood Simple. The Coen brothers’ neo-noir crime film starred John Getz, Frances McDormand and M. Emmet Walsh and told of a Texas bartender who is having an affair with his boss’ wife. When the boss finds out, he hires a private eye to kill the new unfaithful couple.
Tarantino said that the film was “really fun”, but what he “liked the most about it” was that it was an independent art movie with a genre base. “Those were the ones that I always preferred, even when it came to like the Truffaut films or Godard movies,” the director said. “The ones where they were jumping off from a genre were always the ones that I found the most fun.”
Upon seeing Blood Simple for the first time, Tarantino knew that he a) could make something similar and b) he had his heart set on achieving his ambition. “I wanted to be a success like Blood Simple,” the filmmaker admitted. “I wanted to be written about the way Blood Simple was, to be in the newspapers and the ads the way Blood Simple was. It was really great.”
Blood Simple marked the debut of the Coens, who would undoubtedly go on to become two of the greatest directors in the history of contemporary American cinema. While the likes of No Country for Old Men, Fargo and The Big Lebowski would go down as the duo’s greatest works, their first foray into filmmaker played an important part in their careers.
Even more importantly for Quentin Tarantino, it marked the moment at which he knew he could equally make an impression on the film industry and just eight years later, the world saw his debut, the masterful 1992 crime film Reservoir Dogs, which itself changes the landscape of modern cinema.
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