The only director Kurt Russell called a genius: “I don’t know if I’ve ever said that before”
Driving a dagger through the heart of his most trusted, treasured, and famous frequent collaborator, Kurt Russell has only ever called one director a genius, and it wasn’t John Carpenter.
While the actor isn’t obligated to bestow that honorific tag on the director who helmed several of his best and iconic films, what did Carpenter have to say about him? “He can play anybody,” the filmmaker once remarked. “He’s a mimic, and a genius at it.”
Carpenter was happy to call his Elvis, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and Escape from LA leading man a genius-level talent, but the feelings weren’t reciprocated. That’s got to hurt at least a little, especially when the two became synonymous with cult cinema at its finest.
If there are three names who helped mould Russell into the enduring icon he’s become, then Carpenter is one of them. The others are Elvis Presley, whom he kicked in the shins in his screen debut, and Walt Disney, who famously sought Russell’s opinion and ended up changing the ending of Mary Poppins on his advice.
They’re a trio of indelible figures who’ll endure as pop culture monoliths for decades to come, and much can be said of the actual genius Russell was fawning over. He’s not quite on the same level as Elvis or Disney, but Quentin Tarantino is nonetheless one of modern Hollywood’s most influential auteurs.
He grew up as such a John Travolta superfan that he built a shrine to the actor before they’d worked together on Pulp Fiction, and he was also raised on a steady diet of Russell’s back catalogue, so it was almost inevitable they’d cross paths eventually. That said, they only teamed up for the first time on Death Proof because Mickey Rourke thought it was a good idea to reject Tarantino for a second time.
When it was suggested to the king of the cult classic that Tarantino was “like a genius,” he didn’t quite agree. “You can drop the ‘like,'” he informed JoBlo. “He’s a genius. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that before. He knows everything about everything I’ve ever done. He knows every line from every movie.”
It would be completely self-serving if Russell declared Tarantino the only genius he’d shared a set with because he was a self-proclaimed geek who could quote any line at the drop of a hat, but that’s probably not what he meant. He may have played a character called Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, but Russell isn’t an actor who carries one around and waves it in people’s faces.
Sorry, Carpenter, your career-defining lead doesn’t think you’re a genius. Tarantino, on the other hand, gets that pedestal all to himself.
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