The movie Quentin Tarantino called a “fucking fiasco”
There are few critics in the world as harsh as filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. After all, the director behind the likes of Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of cinema. A lover of classic movies and contemporary releases, too, few directors have done more to inspire the current cohort of filmmakers, such as Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve and Paul Thomas Anderson, than Tarantino.
Famously learning his craft from the mere history of cinema, Tarantino didn’t attend film school, instead preferring to learn the craft from his favourite filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone. His films have, therefore, become celebratory mosaics of cinema itself, with each and every one being inspired by previous directors, styles and genres.
In a conversation with The Talks, where he discusses his ability to retain such a bounty of cinematic knowledge, Tarantino states: “[My] head is a sponge. I listen to what everyone says, I watch little idiosyncratic behaviour, people tell me a joke and I remember it. People tell me an interesting story in their life and I remember it”.
Yet, he’s not blind to the fact that some movies are considerably worse than others, with there even being countless classic movies that Tarantino has said to have hated. There are certainly some controversial movies on his list, too, even claiming that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was worse than the universally panned 2008 film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
But, whilst the Last Crusade is a pretty controversial choice, his dislike of Michael Mann’s 1983 film The Keep is far more understandable. Adapted from the novel of the same name by F. Paul Wilson, the film, starring Ian McKellen, Scott Glenn and Gabriel Byrne, tells the story of a group of Nazis who are forced to turn to a Jewish historian for help when it comes to taking on an ancient demon.
The very 1980s concept is a pretty forgettable flick, but thanks to it being helmed by Michael Mann, Tarantino was magnetised to it.
“Frankly, it’s interesting to see a great cinema stylist before he was that good,” Tarantino admits, “he’s not in control of his style, he’s constantly lost and when he’s lost he goes to slow motion, when he’s lost he throws in more smoke, when he’s lost he cranks up the music. When we got through watching it I just said, ‘All right, that was a fucking fiasco’”.
Taking his criticism one step further, he brings up Mann’s wider filmography, adding: “It’s a fiasco…it almost seems sacrilegious to bring up a real movie like The Insider in comparison to The Keep, he’s trying to be a great stylist before he knows his shit”.
Continuing, he adds: “I think that there’s something a little lost when he’s [Mann] not doing a crime story, with the exception of The Insider which they try to make as much like a crime story as they possibly can”.
Take a listen to Tarantino speaking about Mann’s 1983 film below.
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