‘1917’: The movie Quentin Tarantino claimed was “tainted” by one shot
Quentin Tarantino is nothing if not opinionated. Throughout his career in Hollywood, the director has never lost his status as a fan of movies, first and foremost. Unlike many other actors and directors who watch fewer films every year as they become too busy making them, Tarantino still watches everything, and with a relentlessly forensic eye. Brilliantly, he’s also happy to tell anyone who will listen what he thinks of these films, and sometimes, he can be pretty brutal in his verdict. Take, for example, when he condemned an entire 2017 action movie because of one stray shot that wasn’t to his liking.
In December 2022, Tarantino appeared alongside comedy icon Judd Apatow on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast. When talk turned to Sam Mendes’ stirring World War One epic 1917, and Maher began vociferously complimenting Mendes’ presentation of the film as one long, unbroken take, Tarantino wasn’t having any of it. He declared, “You’re too impressed by that”, and explained that he felt Mendes and his team actually cut too many corners when assembling the movie.
You see, despite presenting itself as one long take, the film is full of hidden cuts that only give it the illusion of being unbroken. Tarantino recognised that this was the only way to make the film that way, as a two-hour single take would be unfeasible, but he did have beef with the number of invisible cuts he spotted.
“1917 would be truly impressive if they did the movie with six cuts, and that’s it,” claimed Tarantino. “Not seven-minute cuts, and eight minutes, and seven, and six.”
The Kill Bill helmer clarified that he wasn’t saying Mendes did a bad job of the long takes, per se, he simply wished the director had committed to pushing the production even further into rarified air. He stated, “If you’re going to do it, really fucking do it. Go 15 minutes per fucking take.”
Registering his disappointment with 1917 wound up leading Tarantino neatly onto another film that attempted to pull the wool over his eyes regarding its “oner”. In 2017’s Atomic Blonde, an action film starring Charlize Theron and James McAvoy, director David Leitch presented a bravura ten-minute set piece featuring Theron’s badass espionage agent fighting an army of bad guys up and down a stairwell before spilling out into a car chase through the streets of Berlin.
Tarantino admitted he was initially wowed by the sequence, saying, “When I’m watching like the long fight in Atomic Blonde, I’m like, ‘God. This is amazing! This is fucking amazing!'”
However, when he noticed one of those pesky invisible cuts again, just like in 1917, the whole thing fell down in his estimation like a house of cards. He grumbled, “OK, wait a minute, no. The shot took a shit. The shot’s not going on this long, it took a shit.”
To Tarantino, noticing these cuts compromised the whole scene and the entire film as a result. He mused, “It’s all tainted. It’s all tainted. Because obviously, they didn’t carry it through.”
In truth, Tarantino’s purist nature toward one-take sequences isn’t surprising – he’s always been known to worship at the altar of the old ways in cinema. However, this isn’t to say that the scenes in 1917 and Atomic Blonde weren’t difficult to pull off in their own right, even with the hidden cuts, stitches, and tricks used. They’re still extremely complicated pieces of filmmaking that feature many experts working at the highest level – they just don’t stand up to Tarantino’s fastidious level of scrutiny.
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