Quentin Tarantino names the “most mesmerising cinematic experience” of his life: “I was so rabid”
Few filmmakers are as prone to hyperbole as Quentin Tarantino, who never met a sentence he couldn’t turn into a monologue, but when he says one specific scene stands out as the greatest theatrical experience he’s ever had, you can’t doubt him.
After all, he eats, sleeps, lives, and breathes movies, even if he doesn’t seem very interested in making them anymore. With the pressure on and the years passing, the two-time Academy Award winner’s adoring throngs will not accept anything less than one of the greatest films of all time for his swansong.
He says he’s not feeling the pressure, which is exactly what someone would say when they are feeling the pressure, and the longer it takes, the greater the pressure grows. In the meantime, he’s planning to keep himself busy by returning to acting and mounting a stage production, as well as dabbling in Fortnite, of all things, to keep himself on the cultural radar.
Everyone even semi-familiar with Tarantino’s taste in cinema will know that Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the closest thing he’s got to a definitive favourite movie. However, he’s added hundreds upon hundreds of titles to that list over the years, but Clint Eastwood’s iconic ‘Man with No Name’ doesn’t feature in the sequence that’s stayed with him for over 40 years.
“The most mesmerising cinematic experience I shared with a large auditorium audience during the entire era of ‘New Hollywood’ was undoubtedly the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter,” he wrote in the foreword to Jay Glennie’s The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“I saw that three-hour epic at The South Bay Cinema One at least four times during its initial engagement,” he added. Not only was he staggered by the film’s defining scene, but he was so invested in The Deer Hunter that he was actively rooting against its biggest competitor at the Oscars.
He “cheered like my team won the championship when it beat the fuck out of Coming Home at the Academy Awards,” which is one way to show your enthusiasm for a film. “I was so rabid about The Deer Hunter at 15 that I refused to even see Coming Home out of loyalty to the Cimino picture,” he added, with a young Tarantino missing out on another classic because he’d opted to cut his filmic nose off to spite his cinephile face.
He’d previously revealed that the first time he saw The Deer Hunter, he “thought it was the best movie ever made” and “the best movie I’d ever seen” all at once. Despite that, there was another 1979 release that he “enjoyed the most,” and it was Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky II, obviously.
The theatrical experience can’t be bettered, and it says a lot about how The Deer Hunter‘s definitive scene impacted a teenage Tarantino that he still can’t see past it as the most mesmerising thing he’s ever witnessed with his own two eyes in a packed cinema, because he’s seen an awful lot of movies on the big screen in the four and half decades since.
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