What did Quentin Tarantino think of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’?
You might know Quentin Tarantino first and foremost as a filmmaker, but in his spare time, he is a professional film nerd and occasional critic, dishing up hot takes and paying dues to the directors who inspired his art. Over the years, he’s lauded everyone from Brian De Palma to Todd Phillips and cast aspersions on the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. But what about Kubrick’s greatest of cinematic feats, 2001: A Space Odyssey?
For decades, the director’s existential space epic has been held up as the gold standard of the medium, one of the most imaginative and cinematic films ever made. From its famous opening of the dawning of civilisation to the sinister monotone of the computer HAL, it has been referenced in countless films and taught in pretty much every film studies class.
Speaking on the podcast Club Random with Bill Maher in August of 2024, Tarantino offered his own take on Kubrick’s classic, explaining that for him, the confounding nature of the film is more of a feature than a bug.
“It’s one of the questions of cinema,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons that you can say that there’s a brilliance to, if not Arthur C. Clark’s novel, but to Stanley Kubrick’s movie. He seems to ignore everything about drama except just enough rope with knots in it that connect it to the next knot to the next knot to the next knot.”
You can analyse Kubrick’s work for years without coming to a consensus about what it all means. This is particularly true toward the end, when Bowman, the remaining astronaut, travels through tunnels of fluctuating light until he finds himself in a gleaming white room. He transforms into older versions of himself before turning into a foetus trapped in a transparent sphere drifting toward Earth. And what’s going on with the monolith? It appears in the first and last scenes and at several points in the film, but its nature is never explained.
“A case can be made that when the movie loses it, that when it gets more metaphysical at the end is when he stops supplying knots that are narrative,” Tarantino acknowledged. “And the knots don’t need to connect to each other, they just need to get you forward. And they do.”
Tarantino’s comments suggest that, while 2001: A Space Odyssey might not be the film he turns to for entertainment, he is more intrigued by it than frustrated.
So, what is Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Stanley Kubrick movie?
When it comes to the Pulp Fiction director’s favourite Kubrick movie, 2001 doesn’t make the cut. Surprisingly enough, it’s A Clockwork Orange that Tarantino admires most, despite having criticised Kubrick for claiming that his ultra-violent film was, in fact, anti-violence.
“It’s just, like, ‘Get the fuck off,’” Tarantino said. “I know, and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first 20 minutes; you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it.’”
Ultimately, however, Tarantino was more than happy to praise the film, calling it “as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time.”
…and what was Stanley Kubrick’s favourite Quentin Tarantino movie?
Although Kubrick died in 1999, he was alive long enough for the release of Tarantino’s first three films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown.
It isn’t clear whether the 2001 director watched all three of these films, but what is clear is that he was a huge fan of Pulp Fiction. According to Frederic Raphael, the screenwriter for Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, the director “admired it very much, [and] said, ‘It’s pretty good, okay?’”
Kubrick’s personal assistant, Anthony Edward Frewin, had a similar recollection, saying that his boss described Tarantino’s classic as “slick”.
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