Quentin Tarantino Influences

GENERAL INFLUENCES

I was watching it with a buddy of mine, and it’s all building to this big climax. We hadn’t seen this movie before, so we didn’t know they were going to have the biggest shoot-out in the history of film. My friend turns to me and goes, ‘If they don’t get naked and boogie at the end of this movie, this has been for nothing.’ He was right! Doesn’t matter that we enjoyed everything leading up to the end, it had to end in like a big way or it was all nothing!

cited as something he’d see “wherever the hell it was playing” when he was younger

Gave Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, its name

about Travolta’s performance in this as “one of my favorite performances of all time”

“I love Breathless", naming it as one of two Godard films that influenced his taste in cinema (along with Bande à Part, obviously)

Cage, Nicolas: One of Tarantino’s favorite actors of his generation: “I don’t think I’ve seen another actor in the history of film that made a career of being miscast and rising to the occasion,”

A film that left an impression on him when he was younger, “When I started to develop … my aesthetic.”

This 1973 Pam Grier film was the first of hers that Tarantino saw when he was younger

Corbucci, Sergio: In a 2009 interview with Screencrave, Tarantino referred to this Italian filmmaker as “the other master,” alongside Sergio Leone: “I think my films are closer to his than to Leone’s.”

De Palma, Brian: Tarantino described his early acting lessons (including six years under James Best, who starred in several Samuel Fuller films) before admitting, “I didn’t fit in with the rest of the actors in [Best’s] school … my idols weren’t other actors. My idols were directors like Brian De Palma.”

Griffith, Charles B.: In a 1993 interview with Graham Fuller, Tarantino described himself as “a fan” of this screenwriter, who contributed to several Roger Corman films

It was a formative influence on Tarantino’s younger self when it played at Carson Twin Cinema, a favorite childhood hangout

It was a formative influence on Tarantino’s younger self when it played at Carson Twin Cinema

My favorite screenplay of all time … I know when I go see a movie and I start getting confused, I’m emotionally disconnected, I check out emotionally. For some reason I don’t in Le Doulos.

Leone, Sergio: “I never felt gypped when Sergio Leone ended every Western he did with a showdown,” Tarantino told Roger Ebert in a 1994 interview about the massively influential spaghetti Western director, after being asked about how Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and True Romance all essentially conclude with gun-brandishing face-offs. “That’s just the way they ended. But every single one was different.”

When a pre-filmmaking Tarantino was taking acting classes, he rewrote a scene from the Paddy Chayefsky–scripted classic from memory to perform as a monologue in his class; he told told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2009, “t was the first time somebody complimented me [on my writing].”

Morricone, Ennio: Legendary film composer who contributed to Tarantino’s forthcoming The Hateful Eight, as well as provided a substantial influence throughout Tarantino’s career — to wit: His music appears all over Kill Bill. “To me it sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone music,” he’s quoted as remarking about surf music in Jeff Dawson’s 1995 book Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool.

In a 1992 interview with Positif, Tarantino claims that it was Leone’s 1968 Western that appeared on the TV when he decided to “become a director.”

Tarantino once referred to the actor (who appears in From Dusk Till Dawn) as “one of the greatest actors that has been produced in our lifetime!” in a 1996 interview with J. Hoberman.

Penn, Sean: One of Tarantino’s favorite actors of his generation, for his “sheer sexual-violence charisma,” he told J. Hoberman in 1996.