The one thing Quentin Tarantino loves most about Clint Eastwood: “A unique situation”
Quentin Tarantino has never made it a secret that he is an obsessive cinephile. Name a film, he’s probably seen it. However, there’s one that he seems to hold closer than any other: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Directed by Sergio Leone, the film starred Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name, an antihero character who proved to be highly influential.
The movie’s impact on Tarantino is incredibly apparent; you can feel the influence of the western course through the veins of all of his work, but none more than his own takes on the genre, The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. Enamoured by the gritty take on the classically American genre from the Italian filmmaker, Tarantino has carried this darker, more violent approach to westerns with him throughout his career.
He even called the iconic end scene, where “after you’ve seen all the little shots of the guys getting into position, you suddenly see the whole wideness of the bullring and all the graves around them” his “favourite cut in the history of movies.” Clearly, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly means a lot to Tarantino, who has since been a keen follower of Eastwood’s work.
The Dollars trilogy – the aforementioned film was the last installment – allowed the American actor to break into Hollywood, subsequently making him a western star. He also appeared in various thrillers and action films, such as leading the Dirty Harry series to acclaim in the 1970s, and making his directorial debut in 1971 with Play Misty For Me.
The actor is now one of the most prolific and successful directors in Hollywood, having released acclaimed movies like Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and American Sniper. Tarantino greatly admires Eastwood, not just for his portrayal as the lead character in his favourite film, but also because of his connection with Warner Bros.
Talking to Charlie Rose, the filmmaker said, “What I admire the most about Clint Eastwood, all right, is the fact that he’s an artist and he’s an artist who has managed to control his own world with a patron studio.”
He added, “He has a very unique situation at Warner Bros. Now, there’s other filmmakers that have unique situations. Martin Scorsese could set up a situation like that pretty much at any place and that – he’d be doing his thing, all right? And Woody Allen has that relationship with whoever he works with and – but Eastwood is a little different because Eastwood has a situation with Warner Bros and it’s lasted for a long time, and it’s been profitable for them for a long time.”
Tarantino likes how Eastwood seems to have complete control over his career, highlighting his “responsibility that you just don’t see in other filmmakers, as far as his relationship to Warner Bros. They’re family. There’s just no two, three, four ways about it.”
Eastwood has been able to churn out movies at an impressive pace – his most recent being 2024’s Juror No 2 – and Tarantino thinks it’s wonderful that Warner Bros have such a strong relationship with him. “Clint Eastwood is a member of the Warner Bros family and at the end of the day, he’s almost – he is as important as anybody at Warner Bros and it doesn’t matter if his last film was a hit or not.”
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