The movie Quentin Tarantino became addicted to watching in 1977: “It blew my fucking mind”
No stranger to homaging, referencing, or paying tribute to his favourite filmmakers and movies in his work, Quentin Tarantino holds such a soft spot for a certain cult classic psychological thriller that he even claimed its name for a short-lived business venture.
Co-written by Paul Schrader and directed by John Flynn, Rolling Thunder stars William Devane as a soldier who returns to home soil after years spent in a prisoner of war camp following the Vietnam War. Following an attempted robbery at his home, Charles Rane and his family are left for dead. Unfortunately for the assailants, he survives and embarks upon a rampage of revenge, sporting a hook for a hand and Tommy Lee Jones’ grizzled Johnny Vohden as backup.
In his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino couldn’t speak highly enough of the film, noting that his succinct reaction the first time he saw it was how it “blew my fucking mind”. Not only that, but he became so enamoured with Rolling Thunder that he followed it across Los Angeles and can even remember the exact list of cinemas across the city where he caught a screening.
One particular scene between Devane and Jones stuck in his memory above all, though, when the former notes that he’d finally tracked down the men who killed his son, with the latter’s simple response of “I’ll get my gear” setting the stage for what was to come: “That scene and those lines never fail to drive audiences wild wherever and whenever it’s projected,” he said.
“Trust me, I’ve seem Rolling Thunder with every type of audience imaginable.”
Part of what makes Rolling Thunder linger in the imagination is how grimy and stripped-back it feels compared to the revenge thrillers that followed in its wake. Tarantino has spent much of his career gravitating towards characters cut from the same cloth, figures who communicate through brutality because they’ve long since run out of any healthier language.
It wasn’t just during its initial theatrical run that Tarantino dedicated himself to rewatching it as much as possible, either, with the writer and director admitting that it was a decade-long odyssey: “I loved Rolling Thunder so much that year before it became available on Vestron Home Video,” he added. “For a period of ten years, I followed it all over Los Angeles, whenever and wherever it played.”
Expanding further on his appreciation of its deft combination of character-driven drama and thrilling set pieces, Tarantino went so far as to call Rolling Thunder “the best combination of character study and action film ever made”. With that in mind, his own penchant for balancing dense dialogue-packed exchanges with jarring bursts of onscreen violence makes complete and perfect sense, given his inspirations.
It’s also easy to see why Tarantino responded so strongly to Schrader’s screenplay in particular. Long before he became synonymous with existential loners in Taxi Driver and First Reformed, Schrader had an unmatched talent for writing men who seemed spiritually disconnected from the world around them. Rolling Thunder channels that malaise into something lean, ugly and unexpectedly emotional, which helps explain why Tarantino never viewed it as disposable exploitation cinema in the same way many critics initially did.
Tarantino even founded a distribution company under the Miramax banner called Rolling Thunder Pictures, which sought to release lesser-known favourites of his into cinemas. Despite only lasting four years after its founding before being shuttered in 1999, the movie’s impact on the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs creator is far from over.
In fact, Schrader revealed to IndieWire that Tarantino reached out in regards to his tenth and now abandoned final feature, The Movie Critic, acknowledging Rolling Thunder: “He asked me, ‘Can I redo the ending of Rolling Thunder? And I said, ‘Yeah, go for it. I’d love to see you redo the ending of Rolling Thunder.’ Who knows whether he actually will or not. But it was something that was tickling his imagination in a very Tarantino-esque way.”
What we know now is that he won’t follow through, but given his lifelong adoration of Rolling Thunder, it’s reasonable to expect Tarantino will put his own spin on whatever his next project will be.
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