Quentin Tarantino names cinema’s only perfect filmmaker: “Just a master movie-maker”
Perfection should always be the goal every time a director starts shooting their latest movie, although whether or not that’s even attainable remains debatable. Quentin Tarantino thinks one of his features achieved it, but for his money, only one filmmaker has made it the habit of a lifetime.
Tarantino has never been short on confidence, which has ended up as an albatross around his neck. The two-time Academy Award winner has stuck to his guns so vehemently about retiring after his tenth film that he’s placed an incredible amount of pressure on himself to go out with the biggest possible bang.
If he doesn’t, he’ll open the doors for widespread mockery after focusing so much on his legacy and how the history books will remember him, only to fall flat on his face at the final hurdle. Of course, whatever that swansong ends up being could end up as his greatest work, but nobody will know for sure until he actually makes the thing.
When reflecting on his back catalogue, Tarantino pointed to Reservoir Dogs as being the only perfect flick in his filmography, a sentiment many people would agree with. At the other end of the spectrum are Death Proof and Grindhouse, which he’s held his hands up and admitted were his most egregious failures.
Still, no matter how much he believes in his own abilities, not even an auteur as confident as Tarantino would anoint themselves as a perfect filmmaker. That said, he doesn’t have an issue applying the term to somebody else, as he explained to Charlie Rose.
“He’s just such a perfect filmmaker,” he said of Steven Spielberg. “Like, the taking of Shanghai sequence, for instance, in Empire of the Sun. And I talked to him about Private Ryan and he goes, ‘Oh, we’re going to create the greatest taking of Omaha Beach ever’, and I have no doubt that he will. He’s just a master movie-maker.”
There’s no denying that Saving Private Ryan‘s opening sequence is among cinema’s most unforgettable scenes, and that’s why Tarantino admires Spielberg so much: He said he was going to craft the most authentic and immersive depiction of warfare ever captured on film, and he did.
“That kind of filmmaking language, I think I’ve got it, too, but in a different way,” Tarantino expounded. “But I could learn something from him.” Having helmed the highest-grossing movie of all time on three separate occasions, won three Oscars, and spent half a century weaving between crowd-pleasing blockbusters and acclaimed dramas, there isn’t a filmmaker on the planet who couldn’t stand to learn something from Spielberg.
Tarantino might have developed his own signature style that’s been widely imitated since the 1990s, but even he’s self-aware enough to know that even someone of his standing isn’t above sitting under the learning tree of the masters.
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