Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with Elvis
One of the many hallmarks of a Quentin Tarantino movie is the tributes and homages made to many of his favourite filmmakers, movies, and musical artists. That being said, while his soundtracks haven’t been picked directly from the legendary singer’s back catalogue, his lifelong love of Elvis Presley is well known.
In fact, if it wasn’t for ‘The King’, then modern Hollywood history could have turned out very differently after Tarantino admitted to Jimmy Kimmel that playing an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls proved to be of huge financial benefit when he was trying to cobble together funding for Reservoir Dogs.
It even came with the added benefit of being shown in two parts, with the director revealing that he got paid for both: “So I got paid maybe, I don’t know, $650 for that episode, but by the time the residuals were over three years later I made like $3000,” he said. “That kept me going during out preproduction time, trying to get Reservoir Dogs going.”
By the time True Romance was released a year after Tarantino’s directorial debut, his Elvis appreciation couldn’t have been made any clearer. He may have sold his screenplay off in order for Tony Scott to call the shots, but Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley has an obsession of his own that manifests in the form of Val Kilmer’s apparition, which stands out as his own formative experience of fawning over The King being brought to the screen through one of his own self-penned protagonists.
Tarantino has conflicted opinions on Elvis as a movie star, though, explaining in his book Cinema Speculation that during the period when Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen reigned as the three biggest names in the industry in his eyes, “the young movie star leading man who could have truly given the three actors at the top a run for their money was Elvis Presley.”
However, that didn’t mean he was enthralled by Presley’s filmography, claiming that “they weren’t real movies, they were Elvis Presley movies”. On the other side of the coin, he made a point of singling out Roustabout as “Elvis’ superior vehicle”, which he deemed “a pretty entertaining little picture chock-full of cool elements”. Given his own adoration of martial arts cinema, Tarantino also praises the 1964 feature as “the only film where Elvis gets to demonstrate his Ed Parker-taught karate moves”.
The two-time Academy Award winner’s double-barrelled opinions on Elvis’ contributions to pop culture even extend to his musical output, too, with Tarantino having lauded and lambasted The King in equal measure.
Calling The Sun Session a “hugely important album” and “the purest expression of Elvis there was”, his approval of the pioneering musician’s discography waned as the decades wore on. Speaking to Uncut, his assessment of Presley’s later years was scathing: “If you really love Elvis, you’re ashamed of that man in Vegas. You feel like he let you down. The Hillbilly cat never let you down.”
The discussion between Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction over the differences between fans of Elvis and The Beatles clearly came straight from Tarantino’s heart, and he’s made it clear he falls into the former camp since the very beginning of his career. In his unreleased amateur film My Best Friend’s Birthday, he even plays a character who calls Presley more attractive than any other man, which turned out to be just the first of many references to the seminal singer and songwriter that would become peppered throughout his work.
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