Why Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like Jean Luc Godard any more
Shortly after Jean-Luc Godard’s death in 2022, Molly Ringwald penned a piece for The New Yorker about her friendship with the revered French director. During their time together, they discussed many things, including Godard’s disdain for Quentin Tarantino. “We chatted about recent films,” Ringwald writes. “He didn’t think much of Pulp Fiction, the movie of the moment. ‘Not authentic,’ he declared. (That word again!) However, we both liked Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, a more obscure film by the French Canadian director François Girard.”
Godard was a hero to Tarantino, who has frequently discussed the impact of films like Breathless, Contempt and Pierrot le Fou on his style, once comparing him to the great Bob Dylan. “That’s one aspect of Godard that I found very liberating—movies commenting on themselves, movies and movie history,” Tarantino said. “To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms”.
Tarantino would later name his production company after Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. Once he caught wind of Godard’s comments about his filmmaking, which he once described as “null”, Tarantino’s opinion began to sour. In 2013, after years of singing his praises, Tarantino revealed that he was “not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore. I think Godard is kind of like Frank Frazetta,” he continued. “You get into him for a while, and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him, and then you outgrow. I think that’s what Godard is, at least for me anyway, as a filmmaker”.
It’s funny: that view of Godard as a bright spark fading away to irrelevance is the very same that plagued the director during the second half of the 1960s. In 1967, with revolution in the air, Godard released La Chinoise, a film about a group of university students who embrace Maoist ideals. The director had high hopes for the film, but it received poor reviews and was disowned by the Chinese embassy. As the protests of May ’67 swept across Paris, Godard found his spirit reignited but was haunted by the idea that his films no longer resonated with young people, that he was no longer relevant and would soon be replaced.
As Ringwald’s article explains, Godard was also frequently disowned by the actors he worked with. After meeting with the director to discuss a short film about the making of King Lear, Ringwald was surprised to hear that Godard was “moved” by her request to work with him again, telling her that “other actresses—American actresses, he implied, mentioning Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda—had never wanted to have anything more to do with him.” All of this is understandable. Godard was famously thorny, but I wonder if Quentin Tarantino’s rejection of the director says more about him than it does about Godard. True adoration, I would argue, transcends personal gripes.
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