Quentin Tarantino names modern cinema’s most unappreciated director: “He found himself again”
As someone who has always worn his influences on his sleeve, Quentin Tarantino has never been one to hesitate when it comes to praising the filmmakers he loves.
Not just that, he has often gone the extra mile to make sure that American audiences are exposed to global cinema. Working with Miramax to form a film distribution company called Rolling Thunder Pictures, it was thanks to Tarantino that the works of auteurs like Wong Kar-wai, Takeshi Kitano, and many more were released into American markets and ended up influencing future generations of directors.
The stories about Tarantino’s sources of inspiration are all over the internet, whether it be his short but influential love affair with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (about whom he talked shit later on) in his younger years or his passion for exploitation flicks that shaped his own approach to the aesthetics of cinematic violence. However, there are also filmmakers that he considers to be important, even though they never really served as a direct influence for him.
One such figure is American director Walter Hill, best known for works that are still considered classics, such as The Driver and The Warriors. Although those particular projects still have a considerable following, Tarantino once mentioned in an interview that the rest of Hill’s filmography also deserves more attention, making him one of the most underappreciated filmmakers of the contemporary landscape.
Tarantino said, “A mainstream director who had his day as far as recognition, but I think has been ignored lately, and doesn’t deserve it, is Walter Hill. I think in the last ten years, he’s had a big resurgence in creativity. I think he lost his way for a while in the ’80s. Johnny Handsome, I thought, was a return to form… But I thought, with Geronimo, he went to a really fantastic place… I thought he made a really great classic western, and America just wasn’t worthy of the privilege.”
Geronimo: An American Legend, the film Tarantino cites as one of Hill’s finest works, was a box office failure and didn’t exactly catch the eye of too many critics. In fact, Hill himself later said that he wasn’t fully satisfied with the final product, but Tarantino is right in his observation that The Driver director was onto something with his grand vision for a historical western.
Listing more of his favourites, Tarantino added: “Then he made that movie, Wild Bill. I thought that was really terrific. Then he made that Yojimbo – A Fistful of Dollars remake, The Last Man Standing, which I thought was a blast! I thought that was so much fun…. I was getting annoyed. I was just about getting ready to give up on the guy. And then all of a sudden, he found himself again. And that’s really exciting!”
Despite his advancing age, Hill has continued working into the 2020s, with his latest project having come out in 2022. Titled Dead for a Dollar and starring stars like Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz, it’s yet another western from the filmmaker who once said, “Every film I’ve done has been a western,” the film didn’t exactly reach the highs that Hill is used to but still proved to be a perfect example of the continuation of a cinematic vision from an auteur who still knows exactly what he wants.
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