The one scene that made Quentin Tarantino a “real cinematic director”
For years, Quentin Tarantino has been one of the most well-loved filmmakers in modern cinema. He emerged in the early 1990s with an idiosyncratic vision borrowed from some of his favourite directors of years past. Meshing together these varied influences, Tarantino has honed a style that is instantly recognisable and hard to replicate without coming off as a cheap pastiche.
He debuted with Reservoir Dogs, a film that blended comedy and witty dialogue with plenty of stylistic violence. The most iconic scene involves Michael Madsen’s character, Mr Blonde, torturing Kirk Baltz’s Nash while dancing to Stealers Wheels’ ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’, eventually slicing off his ear. The film caused horror legend Wes Craven to leave the cinema – evidently, it proved too much for even those seasoned scary movie lovers.
After penning scripts that would become Natural Born Killers and True Romance, Tarantino directed his second feature, Pulp Fiction, which received significant praise. It remains one of the most celebrated films of the 1990s – a humorous non-linear tale of crime and deceit led by an impressive ensemble cast. By this point, Tarantino had officially become a huge name in Hollywood, which allowed him to make more movies, from the blaxploitation homage Jackie Brown to the martial arts-inspired Kill Bill.
It wasn’t until 2007, however, that he made a movie that finally convinced him he was a proper director, worthy of being known as a really “cinematic” filmmaker. Death Proof, made as part of the double feature Grindhouse with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, is the closest Tarantino has got to horror. Borrowing from action, slasher, and thriller genres, the movie sees Kurt Russell play a mad stuntman who kills women with cars.
Taking inspiration from exploitation B-movies, the movie is a fun yet shockingly brutal ride, with Russell’s character ruthlessly targeting women with his vehicle, indifferent to the consequences. In one unforgettable scene, Russell causes a massive crash, with Tarantino taking the time to replay the fatal moment to show each woman’s demise. The sequence begins with the women driving and enjoying the song ‘Hold Tight!’ by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Russell overtakes and completes a U-turn that brings him back to them, approaching the car with immense speed and resulting in a crash that literally leaves viewers speechless.
We see one character’s leg fly off and another bounce onto the road—it’s brutal. The music even stops as we are forced to see each character die individually. Tarantino deliberately tried to make the scene as tense as possible. He told an interviewer, “We know what’s going to go on. After being in the dark throughout the whole movie, now we’re actually ahead of the characters. The girls are oblivious until the second before it happens, but with the music I’ve got playing… I’m making the audience complicit in this crash.”
The director continued: “They want the crash to happen. It’s exciting, the girls are driving, and the audience is waiting for it, and they’re waiting for it, and… it’s like a come shot when it happens. And the audience has to admit that they wanted it to crash.”
When Tarantino saw the final product, he knew he had achieved something he had wanted to do for years. By creating such an intense and dramatic crash scene, he had finally made it. “The really good action directors are the real cinematic directors. I’m not saying that’s the only kind of cinema there can ever be, but when it comes to movie magic and wizardry and really knowing how to put film together, those to me are the most cinematic guys”.
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