“None of them are as good as mine”: Quentin Tarantino on ‘Pulp Fiction’ imitators
There are some moments in cinematic history that cause a tsunami-like effect on the future of the medium. One such moment is certainly the release of Quentin Tarantino’s second film, Pulp Fiction, in 1994, in which he laid out the foundations for his cinematic style that would serve him so well over the following decades.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, it was brought to Tarantino’s attention once again of Pulp Fiction’s influence on modern cinema. Rogan noted that after he saw the film in 1994, the world felt different, and the film industry had changed. He then claimed that several other films following Pulp Fiction appeared to imitate Tarantino’s film.
Tarantino responded, “Well, people would ask me about that. They’d go, ‘Hey, did that really bug you?’ There was a period where it seemed like five years in the 1990s were like every crime film kind of had this ironic bit, and they talked about TV shows and played music in a weird way, and everybody was a smart ass.”
He continued, “They asked me, ‘Did that bother you?’ And I go, ‘No, it doesn’t bother me’. One, I don’t think any of them are as good as mine, so it just makes mine look better and better, and my dialogue looked better and better.” Evidently, Tarantino thinks quite highly of his own work and only saw the pale imitators as shining a light on it.
The director went on to draw a comparison with his favourite director Sergio Leone, in how he approached the traditional western drama and how Tarantino himself was attempting to do the same thing but with gangster and crime films. He said, “I was doing to traditional gangster films, like Scorsese Goodfellas kinda movies, what he was doing to traditional westerns when he did his spaghetti westerns.”
On the imitators of his own films, two of which undoubtedly include Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Tarantino then noted, “It wasn’t that they were trying to do Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs; they were trying to exist in the same sub-genre of crime film that I had created, which is what all the other spaghetti westerns that came after Leone’s had done.”
He concluded, “It wasn’t just the fact that they were doing Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs ripoffs, I’d created a subgenre in gangster films that did not exist before, and they were trying to fill that subgenre. And that was fucking awesome! It was great; I had affected gangster films. By that point, to do a Scorsese kind of thing was almost passe.”
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