Quentin Tarantino on the “potent” power of Christopher Nolan
Undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino is known for his snappy, stylish tales that are often spiked with a sharp fondness for violence. Working with the likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson and many more, Tarantino has become a favourite of fans across the world who appreciate his adoration for cinema.
Naming his favourite films of all time on several occasions, Tarantino isn’t shy of stating his opinion on the biggest and best movies of any given year, giving praise to such modern releases as Mad Max: Fury Road, Top Gun: Maverick, and West Side Story in recent years. One filmmaker he’s long appreciated is the British director Christopher Nolan, however, commending his work time and time again, from his early success with 2000’s Memento to 2017’s Dunkirk.
“It’s not just a dollars and cents thing,” Tarantino said of the filmmaker during a 2014 interview with The Guardian: “Christopher Nolan would be just as good of a filmmaker as he is, just as a potent filmmaker as he is if he was making movies in 1975. Or, if he was making movies in 1965. I’d like to see Chris Nolan’s version of The Battle of Bulge. That would be fucking awesome”.
A fan of many of his movies, Tarantino made sure to speak about Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar in great detail, eloquently recalling his theatre experience. “We’re waiting for the movie to start and it hit me. I realised that it hadn’t been since The Matrix that I was actually that interested in seeing a movie even though I didn’t know what I was going to see,” Tarantino explained, “It’s been a while since somebody has come out with such a big vision to things”.
Claimed by many to be Nolan’s very best movie, Interstellar is an epic sci-fi tale that tells the story of a team of space explorers who travel through a wormhole in order to try and save the future of humanity. Starring the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Timothée Chalamet and David Oyelowo, the movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, taking home an Oscar statuette for ‘Best Achievement in Visual Effects’.
Continuing in his thoughts towards the movie, Tarantino added: “Even the elements, the fact that dust is everywhere, and they’re living in this dust bowl that is just completely enveloping this area of the world. That’s almost something you expect from Tarkovsky or Malick, not a science fiction adventure movie”.
Comparisons to the likes of Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky are, indeed, high praise from Tarantino, with the director presumably linking Interstellar back to Malick’s 1978’s Days of Heaven and Tarkovsky’s sci-fi double-bill of 1972’s Solaris and 1979’s Stalker.
Whilst Nolan’s movie certainly reaches for the heights of such aforementioned classics, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’re not so sure it is able to claim the same level of artistry.
Take a look at the trailer for the movie below and judge the film for yourselves.
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