Quentin Tarantino discusses one of the “best performances” he’s ever seen
Having been around since the early 1990s, when he first established his influential style with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, director Quentin Tarantino has occupied the very pinnacle of contemporary cinema ever since. Working with such iconic actors as Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson and Al Pacino, Tarantino has become the kind of all-star filmmaker that he once idolised in his youth.
A lover of all things cinema, whilst Tarantino holds a fondness for filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Takashi Miike and Akira Kurosawa, he also admires the performers that command the screen and bring the greatest movies of all time to life. Over the years, his extensive discussions on the topic have revealed a love for countless performers, from Harvey Keitel to Michael Parks.
On his beloved Video Archives podcast, however, that he put together with his long-time writing partner Roger Avary, Tarantino revealed one unlikely star that gave, in his opinion, perhaps the greatest performance he’d ever seen in his life.
“There was no other performance that knocked me and Roger out quite the way that George C. Scott did in The Hospital,” the director stated, “It was like, ‘wow, is this one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life?’”. An iconic American actor, director and producer, Scott collaborated with some of the greatest directors of all time throughout his time as a performer, including Stanley Kubrick, Robert Rossen and Peter Medak.
Released in 1971, The Hospital is one of Scott’s lesser-known classics, telling the story of a hospital’s chief-of-staff who struggles with his own mortality after he witnesses patients dying in their droves around him. A dark comedy, the film is directed by Arthur Hiller, the same mind behind other similar genre flicks, See No Evil, Hear No Evil with Gene Wilder and The In-Laws with Alan Arkin.
Nominated for an Oscar for his role in the movie, it is not surprising that Scott didn’t win, considering that just one year earlier, he had turned down the chance to collect his Academy Award for his performance in 1971’s war flick Patton. Despite beating out the likes of Jack Nicholson and James Earl Jones, Scott turned down the award due to the fact that he didn’t believe that performances could be compared and judged against each other.
Elsewhere, Tarantino once named the three greatest actors of his generation, claiming that “Sean Penn, Tim Roth, and Nick Cage,” were the best of the bunch.
Speaking about Cage, whose recent cash-grabbing roles have overshadowed the quality of his earlier performances, Tarantino states: “I don’t think that I’ve ever seen another actor in the history of film that made a career of being miscast and rising to the occasion”.
Meanwhile, he added that Roth, who he worked with for Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight, among other titles, had a “chameleon quality,” picking the actor for his “versatility and ferociousness”.
Take a look at the trailer for Scott’s The Hospital below.
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