The “fucked up” movie so violent Quentin Tarantino found it hilarious: “I was laughing a lot”
As the years continue to pass with no sign of his tenth and final feature moving towards the starting line, more and more people are wishing that Quentin Tarantino would just shut the fuck up and get on with it, since he continues to irritate the masses almost every time he opens his mouth.
The two-time Academy Award-winning auteur has always come across as a supremely confident person who frequently crosses the line into arrogance, but nobody seemed to mind that much when he was waxing lyrical about obscure films, unsung directors, and his favourite subject of all: himself.
However, publicly slating actors that he doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with isn’t just unprofessional; it’s a total dick move. Matthew Lillard, Owen Wilson, and Paul Dano were dragged into the firing line for no reason, so perhaps it would be for the best if Tarantino spent less time spouting his opinions and more time working on that screenplay for the movie he seems increasingly frightened to make.
Since it’ll be the swansong from the brains behind Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Inglorious Basterds, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’ll be the most Tarantinoesque movie to ever Tarantino. That means there will almost certainly be plenty of graphic violence, something he’s more familiar with than most.
As well as incorporating many brutal scenes into his own films, the loud-mouthed cinephile also enjoys watching them. Whether it’s exploitation, horror, Asian martial arts flicks, or bone-crunching classics, the filmmaker loves violent cinema. Sometimes, though, he finds himself watching something so unrelentingly bleak that it becomes funny, not that many people would call Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ a barrel of laughs.
“I was laughing a lot during the movie,” he told Bret Easton Ellis. “Not because we were trying to be perverse, laughing at Jesus getting fucked up. Extreme violence is just funny to me, and when you go so far beyond extremity, it just gets funnier and funnier. We were just groaning and laughing about how fucked up this was.”
That’s not a criticism, since he ranked it among his 20 favourite films of the 21st century, but it’s not the reaction anyone would have expected any viewer to get from The Passion of the Christ. Whether it floats your boat or not, Gibson’s biblical epic struck a massive chord among its target audience, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie and top-earning independent production of all time.
Presumably, the Christian audience who turned up in their droves to see the final days of Jim Caviezel’s Jesus Christ depicted on the big screen weren’t pissing their pants with laughter, but Tarantino was. “Mel did a tremendous directorial job,” he added. “He put me in that time period. I talked to Mel Gibson about this, and he looked at me like I was a fucking nut.”
That pretty much hits the nail on the head: Tarantino finding The Passion of the Christ so violent that it was hilarious by default made Mel Gibson, Mel fucking Gibson, of all people, call him a nut.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.