The director who tore Quentin Tarantino’s movie to shreds: “He ripped it apart for two hours”
While Quentin Tarantino is well known for more than happily dishing out the critique, it’s good to know that he can also take it too. Often found dissing the work of his peers or dealing out some savage responses to their works, the director was humbled and perhaps even enamoured when one of his idols ripped into one of his films.
Of the people Tarantino has dared to criticise, the list includes legends like Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, David Lynch and more. Of Lynch, and specifically of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the director claimed, “David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.” Of the French cinematic icon Truffaut, he said, “I think he’s a very passionate, bumbling amateur.”
When it comes to his own work, he’s always been quick to shut down any critique or sometimes even any discussion about his ideas. Throughout his career, he’s been fully committed to his own vision and ready to defend them, once telling a Channel 4 interviewer, “I’m shutting your butt down” when they started a seemingly critical line of questioning. But when one iconic director turned on him, there seemed to be a level to which Tarantino enjoyed it.
“Sam saw my movie in Avignon, and he ripped it apart for two hours,” he told Paris Voice back in 1992. Recalling the moment that the influential American writer and director Samuel Fuller criticised his film Reservoir Dogs, the publication described Tarantino as filled with “glee” as if he was genuinely thrilled by the takedown.
But perhaps the reason for his joy in this conversation with Fuller was less about the director’s influence or status and more about the fact that he seemed willing to engage with Tarantino and his work on a richer level. Making an impression of the director, Tarantino recalled, “He said: ‘It’s a movie about failure. They’re morons. They’re bums’” before revealing that Fuller concluded his lengthy rant on the movie by saying, “‘I like that!’”
That kind of bait and switch of starting out with critique before later revealing that he actually enjoyed the movie left Tarantino starstruck and overjoyed. “He’s harsh and then he takes you off the hook,” he said, now gushing about the praise the director passed down amidst his commentary as he added, “[Fuller] told me that Michael Madsen was the best psycho he’d seen in movies in 30 years!”
So, while Tarantino usually doesn’t take well to criticism that he isn’t dishing out, he was fine with it when it came from a figure he respected and was balanced carefully with praise from a great.
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