The movie Quentin Tarantino called “awful”
Thanks to a bloody trail of dark comedy and gritty entertainment, Quentin Tarantino has fought his way to the top without any formal training. While not the most prolific of filmmakers, the auteur prides himself on controlling all aspects of his stories, injecting each with a distinctive scriptwriting and cinematographic style.
Sadly, Tarantino still plans on collapsing his director’s chair after his forthcoming tenth film, The Movie Critic. During a 2022 interview with CNN, he revealed why. “Well, I’ve been doing it for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and it’s time to wrap up the show.”
“Like I said, I’m an entertainer. I want to leave you wanting more, you know, and not just work, and I don’t want to work to diminishing returns,” he continued. “I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now.”
It also transpires that being both a writer and a director is a rather mentally and physically taxing process. In an interview shared earlier in 2023 by Outstanding Screenplays, Tarantino likened the blank-page writing and directing process to climbing Mt. Everest.
“One of the most talented filmmakers of my generation is David Fincher,” he asserted. “But he’s not in the same category as me because I’m a writer-director, and that makes it different. That makes it a different thing.”
He added: “You are at the bottom of Mt. Everest every single solitary time, and everything you’ve done before not only does not help you, it could even like hang over your head, and that is a tough row to hoe, and you make less movies that way.”
Part of what makes Tarantino such a consummate and successful auteur is his discerning eye for quality cinema. As his Video Archives podcast with Roger Avary attests, Tarantino likes little more than watching and reviewing movies. This hobby was his only filmmaking education and began many years ago.
In a 2020 appearance on the podcast Five Things with Lynn Hirschberg, Tarantino dug back through his many thousands of ticket stubs to discuss every movie he saw at the theatre in 1979. In total, the then-teenage movie geek watched a gobsmacking 131 movies.
Naturally, Tarantino didn’t have time to analyse each in-depth but revealed that Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter was a particular highlight. “The Deer Hunter would have been the movie that would have been the movie of the year for me,” Tarantino told Hirschberg. “I thought it was the best movie ever made. I thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen.”
However, he admitted that “Rocky II would have been the movie that I enjoyed the most.”
On the flip side, there were several movies that Tarantino would rather forget. Recalling a particular dud movie, Tarantino said: “A crappy sexploitation movie called Swap Meet, which was awful!”
Directed by Brice Mack, Swap Meet featured a pre-breakthrough of Danny DeVito and was almost universally panned by moviegoers and critics. Despite being a comedy, it lacked humour and sought cheap teenage appeal with several flaccid erotic scenes.
Watch the trailer for Swap Meet below.
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