“Thanks to me”: Quentin Tarantino had nothing to do with one of the best movies of the 1990s, but still took the credit
There’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker patting themselves on the back for a job well done, but leave it to Quentin Tarantino to pat himself on the back for a job that he didn’t even do.
While he single-handedly upended the landscape of American independent cinema in the 1990s, to the point that every second movie felt like it was a Tarantino knockoff, the writer and director still felt that his influence had extended far beyond an endless onslaught of pale imitators.
He’s always been self-aware enough to realise that people have gladly ripped him off, just like everybody knows he’s been ripping other people off in one way or another since the beginning of his career, but taking credit for one of the best films of the 1990s is stretching the limits of self-smugness to breaking point.
It’s 100% true that the two-time Academy Award winner created two of the decade’s finest efforts in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but other than sharing a similar genre as a crime thriller, only he could connect those dots and suggest that a seminal serial killer story only existed because he was the one who laid the groundwork.
“No one was ready for Reservoir Dogs in 1992, no one was ready for Pulp in 1994,” he told Vanity Fair. “That trail hadn’t been blazed. It was a very conservative time. I changed that. Seven had a clear path, thanks to me.” In most cases, you’d laugh at someone suggesting they were the real brains behind the existence of David Fincher’s classic, but since this is Tarantino, nobody should be surprised.
Does his bold claim even hold water? Not really. Andrew Kevin Walker had been working on the script since before Reservoir Dogs was released, and the year Pulp Fiction arrived was the year that producer Arnold Kopelson acquired the script and brought it to New Line Cinema, which ultimately got it made, which sounds more like a coincidence than anything else.
Then again, it’s on-brand for Tarantino to claim that because he’d penned and helmed a pair of violent, R-rated crime thrillers that ushered in a new era, a movie that wasn’t like Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction at all, and eventually made more money at the box office than both of them combined, only made it in front of the cameras because he’d been kind enough to open the door for Fincher to walk through.
Even at that, Fincher was constantly battling against the studio so that he didn’t have to soften Seven‘s edges, which was nothing like Tarantino being given the freedom to shoot his scripts however he wanted, never mind a dark, dingy, and atmospheric story about a murderer carrying out biblically-inspired killings bears no similarities whatsoever to either of those pictures.
Yes, Tarantino blazed a trail that many filmmakers followed, but only because they were ripping him off. As for Seven, only an egomaniac would dare to try and pin it on themselves when they had nothing to do with it, and it would be interesting to know if he brought it up to Fincher on the set of The Adventures of Cliff Booth, but he probably didn’t because he seems like a bit of a shitebag in that respect.
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