Quentin Tarantino’s rivalry with Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles: “Fuck those guys”
A lover of cinema from across the globe, Quentin Tarantino consumes all types of movies, from bizarre action flicks to niche western films. A particular fan of such directors as Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Sergio Leone, Tarantino rarely criticises his fellow filmmakers, though he does have a peculiar dislike for the likes of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles.
When it comes to the latter pair, Kubrick and Welles, it seems as though Tarantino’s criticism goes a little deeper, stating on an episode of CBS’s Sunday Morning: “I have a sibling rivalry with Stanley Kubrick – all right – same thing with Orson Welles. Fuck those guys”.
Despite the duo helming some of the greatest movies of all time, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Citizen Kane, Tarantino added: “They’re not all that”.
There is certainly evidence to suggest that Tarantino wasn’t too fond of Kubrick, stating in an interview that his films were too cold, appreciating the films rather than passionately loving them. Though he says that the opening twenty minutes of 1971’s A Clockwork Orange “is pretty fucking perfect”, he goes on to add: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence”.
Continuing, Tarantino said of Kubrick: “It’s just, like, get the fuck off. I know, and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did, you’re a fucking liar.”
Tarantino has also previously expressed his love for Adrian Lyne’s remake of Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita, calling the adaptation a “masterpiece” before questioning if the latter filmmaker had even read the original book by Vladimir Nabokov.
As for Orson Welles, well, it’s never been made publicly clear exactly why Tarantino isn’t a fan of the actor and director who helmed such classics as 1958’s Touch of Evil and 1962’s The Trial, adapted from Franz Kafka’s iconic novel of the same name.
To put on our tweed Deerstalker hat for just a moment, our prediction is that Tarantino may have been jealous of Welles’ acting capabilities, being known for being a filmmaker just as much as an established performer. “I didn’t put myself in Jackie Brown, you know, I didn’t give myself some silly cameo,” Tarantino told Roger Ebert back in 1997, “But as far as my acting is concerned, I just want you to know I’m serious about it. It’s not me screwing around, all right? It’s not some ego thing. It’s a need – all right? It’s one of my colours; it’s one of my palettes.”
Yet, even the most ardent of Tarantino supporters would state that acting isn’t one of the director’s “palettes,” with his most recent performances in Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way and his own film Django Unchained being truly awful. For Tarantino, it seems Kubrick’s ego and inability to embrace violent, commercial cinema and Welles’ multifaceted talents may have been why he considered them such close rivals.
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