Quentin Tarantino names “one of the greatest staples in cinema”
If there was but one person in Hollywood you could trust with knowing something about the history of cinema, then you’d be a fool not to at least consider calling up Quentin Tarantino. The Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director hasn’t just contributed to the medium of cinema itself but has proven his encyclopaedic knowledge of the movies time and time again.
After all, long before Tarantino made his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs, he had consumed movies in almost industrial quantities while working at a video rental store by day and spending the rest of his time at the cinema by night, giving the future filmmaker one of the broadest cinematic knowledge in Los Angeles.
It’s well known that Tarantino absolutely loves horror movies and spaghetti westerns, but perhaps prior to the release of Kill Bill, one might not have understood his deep passion for the martial arts genre, too. However, the truth is that QT indeed loves everything kung fu, especially when it’s shown in all its bloody glory on the big screen.
In an interview with UPI, Tarantino once spoke of his love for martial arts movies and went as far as to call them a “staple of cinema”. Ahead of the release of Kill Bill Vol. 1, Tarantino admitted to being “fortunate” enough to be part of the generation that witnessed the “first big kung fu explosion in America”, with the likes of David Carradine in Kung Fu and Bruce Lee in Five Fingers of Death.
However, Tarantino admitted that from around the mid-1970s, kung fu movies “died in mainstream America”, though they were being “kept alive by the Black community” in South Central L.A., Detroit and D.C. “I still went and saw them all; I grew up with them,” Tarantino said. “I mean, martial arts films, to me, are one of the sub-genres of my life. To me, that is like one of the greatest staples in cinema.”
By the time the late 1990s and early 2000s rolled around, martial arts movies enjoyed a new renaissance with the release of the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix using kung fu sequences to a masterly degree. Still, Tarantino couldn’t help but become “pissed off” when film critics would think of The Matrix and not recall the golden age of martial arts cinema in Hollywood.
“I love this genre. I think it’s one of those things like horror films or musicals, where it’s almost like the damn movie camera was invented to film this,” Tarantino gushed. “When you get the right Kung Fu film, the right Hong Kong-style action movie, it’s as if the medium was invented just to do this. It’s like what cinema can be, where it really becomes an art form all unto itself.”
Evidently, Tarantino’s love for kung fu and martial arts cinema is just as strong as his passion for western or horror movies. When Kill Bill came along, the director was finally afforded the opportunity to pay his respects to some of the great works of martial arts cinema and pay homage to them. The director has frequently spoken of his favourite movies of all time, and the works of John Carpenter and Sergio Leone are always heavily featured, but one can undoubtedly add Bruce Lee’s movies to the long list.
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