Quentin Tarantino names his three favourite Oliver Stone movies
As a master auteur, the nine movies created by Quentin Tarantino to date are characterised by a blend of dark comedy, exaggerated, bloody violence, and a recurring ensemble of top-flight actors. Whether set in a 19th-century haberdashery or 1990s Los Angeles, Tarantino’s script and cinematographic style imprints a distinctive identity.
Although he may enter into collaborations, cameo roles and production duties, Tarantino has long maintained that his tenth movie would be his last. During an interview with CNN in 2022, Tarantino revealed why he plans to leave it at ten. “Well, I’ve been doing it for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and it’s time to wrap up the show.”
“Like I said, I’m an entertainer,” he continued. “I want to leave you wanting more, you know, and not just work, and I don’t want to work to diminishing returns. I don’t want to be… one, I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now. And that’s what happens.”
As a writer, producer and director, Tarantino enjoys full command over his features, but the process is more mentally and physically taxing as he opens himself up to criticism time and again. In an interview recently shared by Outstanding Screenplays, Tarantino likened the blank-page writing and directing process to conquering Mt. Everest.
“You are at the bottom of Mt. Everest every single solitary time, and everything you’ve done before not only does not help you, it could even like hang over your head, and that is a tough row to hoe, and you make less movies that way. And it’s a lot easier to go and look at the scripts that are out here and available, and you can maybe work with the writer, do a little rewrite or do that kind of thing, and you get more movies made.”
“But, you know, cut to six years down the line, and where’s that voice? It’s gone away,” he concluded.
While Tarantino prefers to helm all aspects of his movies and accept retirement with a smaller filmography, he still holds prolific, ageing directors in high esteem. One such example is Oliver Stone, the Vietnam veteran turned filmmaker, who cut his teeth writing screenplays, including those for Brian De Palma’s Scarface, John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian and his own direction, Midnight Express.
At 77 years old, Stone’s directional filmography is 26 strong, and following a run of successful documentary films over the past few years, he shows few signs of slowing down. Like Tarantino, Stone enjoys writing scripts for his movies but often co-writes or directs scripts pitched by external writers, once even adapting Tarantino’s screenplay for Natural Born Killers.
In a past interview, Tarantino recalled enjoying Stone’s movies at the cinema in the 1980s when he was working at a video rental store in California. “I was definitely excited by new Oliver Stone movies ‘cause we saw Salvador… Wow, this was fucking amazing! Then we saw Platoon, and we saw The Hand at the theatre when it came out.”
Continuing, Tarantino revealed that he and his rental store colleagues saw holes in Stone’s technique but were generally fascinated by his output. “We all had our little problems with him and everything, but no, he was a really exciting dude,” he said.
The enthusiastic filmmaker then pondered three favourites from Stone’s oeuvre. “As time has gone on, I think his best movie is JFK, and uh… On Any Given Sunday,” he began. “Wall Street is probably my favourite, not so much the third act where now he’s got to drop the dime on Gordon Gekko, and Gordon Gekko has to go to jail when we don’t want him to go to jail, you know?
“But that whole first half, especially Charlie Sheen working himself up into the room, where he could actually make the pitch. Well, that was me hoping to get in the room one of these days and make my pitch and make my dreams come true.”
Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Oliver Stone movies:
- Wall Street (1987)
- JFK (1991)
- Any Given Sunday (1999)