“Very mediocre”: Five directors Quentin Tarantino can’t be bothered with
Of all the auteurs currently working in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino is the closest one to a star in the conventional sense. Love him or loathe him, his films are an event.
This pedestal, in part, is underpinned by the distinctiveness of his work. You know what you’re signing up for with a Tarantino film. He likes what he likes, and he presents his fancies with unabashed enthusiasm. You’re going to see a woman’s foot. You’re going to be bombarded with pop culture references. You’re going to see the ‘rule of cool’ rule the roost.
These tropes are intrinsic and steadfast in his work. They are inspired by the cinema that he loves and deployed with great gusto. So, it also stands to reason that what he doesn’t like about other films is equally irrevocable. These avoidances are just as linked to his specific mode of operating.
However, his critique is often more nuanced than quips about a lack of action or too little style. This eye for detail is perhaps what has drawn him towards his supposed latest forthcoming feature, The Movie Critic (though whether it will come to fruition or not is another trope of his). This is a guise he has even ventured into himself with his latest book Cinema Speculation and large swathes of the novelised version of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In short, he has always been s student of film first, and a director second.
As he once famously quipped, “When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘No, I went to films’.” He has cast his eye over a plethora of pop culture comparable only to The Simpson’s comic book guy. And given his outspoken nature, it is not surprising that a lot of it hasn’t been to his taste. Just ask poor old Paul Dano who he slammed as “weak”.
With that in mind, we have curated a list of directors that Tarantino has voiced a dislike for in the past and looked at the reasons behind is cutting critique. From a comic spat with Jean-Luc Godard to an interesting insight to Alfred Hitchcock, these are the directors that Quentin Tarantino hates and the curious reasons why he doesn’t like them.
The five directors Quentin Tarantino hates:
David Lynch
When David Lynch took his surrealism to new heights with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992, he divided audiences. Tarantino was firmly in the camp that hated his David Bowie-fronted epic. It prompted him to comment: “David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.”
While Lynch has since complimented Tarantino, calling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood “a hell of a good revenge movie,” we have no idea whether Tarantino thinks Lynch has emerged from his own bearded wheeto since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. However, what we do know is that the flashpoint between the two American auteurs has been the subject of much philosophising.
As David Foster Wallace famously wrote: “Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitisation, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
Jean-Luc Godard
There was a time when Tarantino loved Jean-Luc Godard. He even offered up a lofty comparison, stating: “That’s one aspect of Godard that I found very liberating—movies commenting on themselves, movies and movie history,” Tarantino stated, “To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms.” And Tarantino even went so far as to name his production company after the 1964 film Bande à part.
However, in typically French fashion, that didn’t raise his stock in Godard’s camp. “I think his work is null,” the late director said of his admirer. “He chose the title of one of my worst films to name his production company. That doesn’t surprise me at all”. Later dubbing him as “not authentic”.
This may or may not have influenced Tarantino’s reversal on his appreciation in return. “I’m not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore,” he stated in an interview where he discusses his cinematic role models, “I think Godard is kind of like Frank Frazetta. You get into him for a while and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him and then you outgrow. I think that’s what Godard is, at least for me anyway, as a filmmaker.”
Alfred Hitchcock
While Tarantino accepts that Alfred Hitchcock was a pioneer, he happily posits that being the first person to run a four-minute mile doesn’t necessarily make you the best runner, so to speak. “I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further,” he said. “I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin’s and Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock.”
Going further and commenting: “People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think it’s wonderful when actually it’s a very mediocre movie.” However, he accepts that there were limiting factors that impacted his work. “The 1950s held him down, Hitchcock couldn’t do what he, left to his own devices, would’ve wanted to do. By the time he could do it in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, he was a little too old,” he said.
All the same, even outside of a handicapping era of conservatism, Tarantino think Hitchcock had an inherent flaw. “I normally don’t like the third acts of his movies,” he told the 2 Bears 1 Cave podcast, “often times they peter out.”
John Ford
“One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously,” Tarantino famously declared in an interview with Henry Louis Gates. “To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that who kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity. And you can see it in the cinema in the thirties and forties—it’s still there. And even in the fifties. The idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms.”
And it wasn’t just the undercurrents to Ford’s work – who by contrast is a hero to Martin Scorsese – that Tarantino hates. He also stated: “Ford’s photography has always been overrated in my estimation.” When it comes to the Western genre, Tarantino thinks Sergio Leone wipes the floor with the competition.
Leone once said, “When I was younger, I believed in three things; Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.” That is not only a quirky quote, but a line that could’ve quite easily come from a Quentin Tarantino script. As Tarantino said himself, “The one artist that I think has been the most influential to me in my work has got to be Sergio Leone.” Adding that he sees a stylistic kinship in many things that he does, “That kind of half-assed operatic quality, the way the music takes over, and his way of directing via set-pieces a lot of the time. I think he is the filmmaker who you can spot the most in my work.”
Wes Craven
Tarantino’s love of blood, gore and violence is very well-known. So, with that in mind, you can maybe predict his problem with the slasher classic Scream: it was bloody, gory, or violent enough. “I could have imagined doing the first Scream,” Tarantino told Vulture. “The Weinsteins were trying to get Robert Rodriguez to do it. I don’t even think they thought I would be interested.”
Adding: “I actually didn’t care for Wes Craven’s direction of it. I thought he was the iron chain attached to its ankle that kept it earthbound and stopped it from going to the moon.” Once again, there is perhaps a personal backstory to this criticism as Tarantino did once reveal that Craven walked out of Reservoir Dogs citing that the torture scene was too much for him.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.