Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Quentin Tarantino ripoff: “That might be the only film that guy ever made”
In the early ’90s, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction changed the Hollywood landscape forever and immediately launched a raft of imitators. The rest of the decade was littered with pulpy tales of fast-talking criminals and large groups of characters whose separate stories intermingle unexpectedly. In fact, there were so many of these films that the word “Tarantinoesque” became ubiquitous when describing their vibes. However, Tarantino wasn’t offended that so many filmmakers seemed to have taken their opportunity to rip him off – and he actually loved one of these imitators so much that he kept the movie in the public’s mind for years by mentioning it in interviews.
In truth, it’s not particularly surprising that Tarantino would find imitation the most sincere form of flattery – because he’s been honest throughout his career that he constantly takes inspiration from other filmmakers in his movies. In fact, Tarantino has always worn his influences on his sleeve, admitting that he has homaged, referenced, and outright ripped off many of the 1970s crime, exploitation, and martial arts movies he loved watching as a young movie fanatic. So, when he noticed movies like Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, 2 Days in the Valley, The Boondock Saints, Freeway, and The Immortals doing his thing, he took it as a compliment.
“I’m flattered by all those guys,” Tarantino told The Village Voice in 2009, “but every time people start writing me off because of them, I come up with a new movie, and they go, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to sound.’ Actually, I like some of those movies. I got a big kick out of everything that happened after Pulp Fiction.” He compared himself reinventing the gangster movie to Sergio Leone creating the spaghetti western subgenre in the ’60s and reasoned, “There were some good films that came out.”
Tarantino namechecked Lucky Number Slevin, a 2006 Paul McGuigan joint starring Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, and Morgan Freeman as “pretty good,” but admitted his favourite rip-offs are the ones that came out of Hong Kong like Too Many Ways to Be No. 1. Fascinatingly, he dubbed Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s widely acclaimed The Usual Suspects as his “least favourite” before declaring his favourite is a relatively unknown flick made by a director who never made another feature film.
“Love and a .45 was really good,” Tarantino exclaimed. “It was very close to True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and Reservoir Dogs all combined. That might be the only film that guy ever made, but he had a gift for really funny dialogue.”
Interestingly, CM Talkington, the director of Love and a .45, is adamant that he didn’t actually draw any inspiration from Tarantino when making his movie, released to minimal fanfare in November 1994. However, he’s also not mad about it being tagged with the “Tarantinoesque” monicker, and he’s always been grateful to Tarantino for keeping it in the conversation with his comments.
You see, when Talkington was shopping his script around Hollywood in the early ’90s, he kept hearing executives say, “Oh, this reminds me of Quentin Tarantino.” He told Money into Light, “I had not seen anything he had done or read anything he had written, but I realised that I was riding on his coattails. He was really helping me indirectly.”
Even at this early stage, though, Talkington knew the comparison would ultimately hurt him, especially if Tarantino’s career took off and his didn’t. He even considered removing some of the more Reservoir Dogs-y elements from his screenplay but ultimately decided against it. In the end, he insisted, “I am just so happy to have gotten the film made.”
After seeing Love and a .45, which starred a young Renée Zellweger and Peter Fonda, Tarantino even befriended Talkington. The pair spent a week together at the Stockholm Film Festival, shooting the shit about the similar movies they loved, and Tarantino later invited him to the set of 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn.
The subject of whether or not Talkington “ripped off” Tarantino could have been the elephant in the room, and the filmmaker admitted he knows Tarantino still “believes that I imitated his style.” However, as he wrote his film around the same time Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs, he feels he knows the truth – and harbours no ill will. “Maybe I’m Quentin’s favourite imitator because I didn’t imitate him?” Talkington smiled. “I’m gonna give him a big hug if I ever see him again.”
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