Quentin Tarantino names cinema’s unsung genius: “That level of work is unfathomable”
Everyone who’s even vaguely familiar with Quentin Tarantino and his filmography is fully aware that he’s a gigantic nerd. Whether it’s cinema or music, the writer and director is capable of rattling off trivia about deep cuts and cult classics the average cinemagoer has never even heard of.
It would be selling him short to say it’s shaped his entire career, with Tarantino famously remarking that instead of going to film school, he went to films. While his reputation as a magpie who picks certain elements from his favourite films and repurposes them in his own work has occasionally come under criticism, a hefty percentage of the viewers who catch them on the big screen probably don’t have a clue.
Raised on a steady diet of Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, exploitation cinema, and gratuitous B-movies, Tarantino absorbed those influences and inspirations and used them to hone a signature style that ultimately reshaped the entire independent scene in the 1990s when every aspiring filmmaker set out to make their own Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction.
Throughout his career, the two-time Academy Award winner has amassed a number of recurring collaborators, not just his on-camera cohorts. Editors Sally Menke and Fred Raskin, cinematographers Andrzej Sekula and Robert Richardson, producer Lawrence Bender, and production designers David and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco have all worked with Tarantino on multiple films.
They’re key parts of his inner circle who arguably didn’t get the credit they deserved when the auteur’s bombastic personality invariably makes the lion’s share of praise fall on his shoulders, which is no doubt why he was so adamant that the unheralded mastermind behind some of his favourite imagery blew his mind to such an extent.
“You think of all of Sergio Leone’s films and most of Sergio Corbucci’s westerns were all done by Carlo Simi, who was the costume designer and the production designer, and he did the props,” Tarantino explained to Kim Morgan. “I mean, can you imagine the guy who came up with the Django costume and Angel Eyes’ costume and the ‘Man with No Name’ costume?'”
“He also found the circular graveyard in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or that fucking rope bridge over the quicksand or the fucking muddy town in Django,” he continued. “I mean, what a genius. That level of work is almost unfathomable.”
Simi was an architect by trade before getting into the movie business, which might explain why he had such a keen eye for backdrops, buildings, and locations perfectly tailored to a director’s sensibilities. Tarantino grew up on Leone and Corbucci, and it left him staggered that one person was responsible for so much of their indelible iconography without ever being spoken of in the same breath.
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