Three directors who “disappeared so far up their own ass,” according to Quentin Tarantino
With Quentin Tarantino continuing to delay his tenth and final movie for as long as possible, is it fair to say that he’s become that which he once despised: a filmmaker in serious danger of permanently disappearing up his own arse?
It’s no secret that Quentin Tarantino fans don’t come much bigger than Quentin Tarantino, who considers himself one of the two best directors in cinema, alongside David Fincher. While many folks would likely agree with him, it’s awfully self-aggrandising when he says it himself.
The two-time Academy Award winner’s influence can’t be overstated or underestimated, and he’s had a bigger impact on the landscape of modern cinema than most of his peers. However, the fact that he knows it and loves hearing it has often placed him on the wrong side of the very thin line between self-confidence and outright arrogance.
Has he painted himself into a corner by repeatedly declaring that he’s washing his hands of feature-length filmmaking after the next one, especially when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was already the perfect swansong? Obviously, he’ll deny it, but Tarantino the persona has become so inextricably tied to Tarantino the filmmaker that many people think he vanished up his own backside a long time ago.
In a simpler time, when he was merely the industry’s latest rising star, he couldn’t imagine anything worse. As far back as 1992, he knew what he wanted to be, and he knew exactly who he didn’t want to be: “I’m not coming from the attitude that I want to run as far away from the studios as I can, or the attitude that I want to run up to the studios as much I can, because there’s danger in both. You don’t watch out, and the next minute, you’re Richard Donner.”
His bizarre trashing of the director behind Superman, The Goonies, and Lethal Weapon aside, Tarantino was also confident that he never wanted to paint on a smaller canvas. “At the same time, if all you do is these little art films for ten years for a million or two dollars, you’re going to climb up your own ass,” he told Ella Taylor. ” When was the last time Nicolas Roeg made a good movie?”
At the time, Roeg’s most recent picture was his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, which was his most acclaimed in years, although it evidently didn’t tickle Tarantino’s pickle. He also accused David Lynch of having “disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie,” and that was long before Mulholland Drive.
As for Gus Van Sant? He was accused of being a “parody of himself” years before he earned two ‘Best Director’ nominations at the Oscars for Good Will Hunting and Milk, and prior to getting himself back into Tarantino’s good books with his utterly pointless shot-for-shot remake of Psycho.
His biggest issue was that Roeg, Lynch, and Van Sant had “become known for their quirky personality,” and because “they can do whatever they want, they showcase their quirky personality.” He’s entitled to his opinion, but does he not owe his entire career to being able to do whatever he wants and making unmistakably Quentin Tarantino movies that showcase his own “quirky personality”? Pot, meet kettle.
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