Quentin Tarantino is renowned for being a massive movie geek. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Quentin Tarantino is renowned for being a massive movie geek. Photo / Jason Oxenham
When it comes to movies, Quentin Tarantino knows what he’s talking about.
The film-maker isn’t just known for making some of the most revered films including Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill, but he’s renowned for being a massive movie geek.
Tarantino doesn’t just create pop culture, he inhales it.
Tarantino’s own “origin story” as someone who worked at a video shop for five years is legendary, as are his childhood exploits watching movies he was way too young to have seen. He wrote his first screenplay at 14.
So, yeah, when Tarantino names six “perfect” movies, you pay attention.
Tarantino is on the promo trail for his nonfiction book, Cinema Speculation, and he stopped in at the Jimmy Kimmel Show to have a chat.
“Well, there’s not many [perfect films], that just bemoans that the film art form is hard. Look, when you say perfect movies you’re talking about any individual person’s aesthetic, but even trying to account for all aesthetics, perfect movies kind of cross all aesthetics to one degree or another.”
These are the perfect films, according to Tarantino, and in no particular order:
Scene from film Back To The Future. Photo / Supplied
He also initially had The Wild Bunch on that list but conceded that it wasn’t perfect but that “its imperfections are part of its glory” but for his definition of a perfect movie as “something that’s so unassailable, he retracted The Wild Bunch.
You may have noticed that Tarantino’s list is made of five movies from the mid-1970s and one from 1985, and that may speak to the fact those films came out during his formative years when he was establishing his unadulterated love for the cinema. Tarantino was born in 1963.
But that doesn’t mean he has remained seated during every movie. In a LA Times profile, he revealed the only two movies he’s ever walked out of.
One was Bambi, which he saw as a kid and asked to leave after Bambi’s mum was shot and the forest burned. He said to the LA Times, “I think Bambi is well known for traumatising children. It’s a cliche, but it’s true.”
He also couldn’t sit through a drive-in showing of Last House on the Left, Wes Craven’s 2009 revenge thriller, despite his well-known predilection for horror and grindhouse.
“So for me, Last House on the Left and Bambi are sitting on the f**king shelf right next to each other. Both take place in the woods and both had me saying, ‘I gotta get out of here’.”
And maybe he hasn’t walked out of a superhero movie yet – possibly he hasn’t seen one? – but Tarantino is certainly waiting for the day Marvel and DC epics no longer dominate movie culture.
He is the latest prominent film-maker to give a kick to Marvel and DC following Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, James Cameron, Alejandro G. Innaritu and Ken Loach.
Tarantino likened them to the movie musicals of the 1960s, calling the superhero movement a “chokehold” and argued that auteurs are waiting for the day when its time has passed.
“The writing’s not quite on the wall yet, the way it was in 1969 when it was ‘Ohmigod, we just put a bunch of money into things that nobody gives a damn about anymore”.
