Quentin Tarantino’s favourite directors in the western genre
Since he emerged with his shocking debut feature Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has experimented with various genres, paying homage to some of his favourite filmmakers. Imbued with a love for cinema at a very young age, the Pulp Fiction director has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium, having seen the biggest of blockbusters to the most niche of B-movies.
While Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction fell nicely into the crime genre, with plenty of crooked criminals and unforgiving characters causing chaos in both films, Tarantino decided to expand his influences when he made Jackie Brown. While it is also a crime film, the feature also heavily pays homage to the blaxploitation era, even casting Pam Grier in the leading role.
Meanwhile, Kill Bill takes inspiration from samurai and martial arts cinema, as well as drawing upon the revenge storylines common in blaxploitation films like Coffy and Foxy Brown. However, one of Tarantino’s all-time favourite genres is westerns, something he somehow didn’t fully explore until years into his career. It wasn’t until 2012 that he made his first western, Django Unchained, soon following it with 2015’s The Hateful Eight.
Until then, Tarantino had taken inspiration from western directors in less overt ways, such as studying the ways that his favourite western filmmakers used violence. As we know, violence is a trademark of Tarantino’s work, but he might not have been able to utilise it so well if not for the influence of his most beloved filmmakers working within his favourite genre.
One of Tarantino’s go-to western filmmakers is Sergio Corbucci, the man responsible for Django, which, of course, inspired Django Unchained. He also directed Navajo Joe, The Great Silence, Compañeros, and The Mercenary, becoming known for his particularly brutal strand of western movies.
Tarantino has been significantly inspired by his approach, telling The Shelf, “I think of all the Wests that have been depicted in cinema, consistently his was the most brutal, his was the most violent, his villains were the most depraved, and his heroes were in some ways the most unheroic – they could be bad guys in another movie, but by virtue of the fact that his villains are so loathsome, that they’re the good guys by process of elimination because they don’t like the bad guys.”
He likes how Corbucci’s films had strong political and social ties to the state of the world during the postwar era, adding, “But I also do think that Corbucci’s Westerns, as opposed to any other Western director’s Westerns, they were basically dealing with fascism. Almost all of them dealt with the fascism left over from World War II to some degree or another – which would be honest enough coming from his point of view having lived under Mussolini.”
Besides Corbucci, he also loves Sergio Leone, citing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as his all-time favourite movie. He once explained why: “Because it’s the greatest achievement in the history of cinema.” Tarantino also believes that the film was hugely influential in terms of its score, which was created by Ennio Morricone. “The way we cut to music now: you pick some rock song and you cut your scene to that song. That all started with Leone and Morricone, and particularly with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” he wrote in an essay.
Tarantino summed up his love for Leone by writing, “I would go even as far as to say that he is the greatest combination of a complete film stylist, where he creates his own world, and storyteller. Those two are almost never married. To be as great a stylist as he is and create this operatic world, and to do this inside a genre, and to pay attention to the rules of the genre, while breaking the rules all the time — he is delivering you a wonderful western.”
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