What is the movie that inspired Tarantino to enter the world of cinema? This said the director

the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino shared this Thursday in Cannes the film “Rolling Thunder” as a special guest of the Filmmakers Fortnight, in a master class in which he explained how that film was the first film he felt he had truly discovered and how it influenced his career.

The film that was going to be screened in what was the most anticipated event of this parallel section of the Cannes Festival – there had been no tickets left for days to enter the Croisette Theater and even so, dozens of people queued to try to get a last-minute slot- It had been kept secret until now, when Tarantino himself took the stage to reveal it.

“It was the first film with which I felt that I had discovered it and that other people did not know”, he said, and the one that made him “start to take seriously” himself as a “film critic”.

After the projection, which was made in 35mm analog format (something that unleashed cheers from the audience when Tarantino announced it), the 60-year-old filmmaker had a chat in which he answered questions from the artistic director of the Fortnight, Julien Rejl. He thus explained that the first time he saw this 1977 film directed by John Flynn it happened by chance.

He had actually gone to the movies with his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles to see “Enter the Dragon,” the movie with Bruce Lee that all his classmates had already seen except him.

The screening available was a double session that was accompanied by this Flynn film in which two tortured veterans of the Vietnam War return to find an even crueler reality for which they must take revenge. And there occurred a real cinematographic crush that he did not stop revisiting afterwards.

The conversation on the Croisette delved above all into the topics that Tarantino dealt with in his 2022 book “Cinema Speculation” (“Meditations of cinema”), in which he reflects on some of the films that have influenced him the most and on his vision of cinema. cinema.

Among those influences is “Rolling Thunder” although its own screenwriter, Paul Schrader, disowned it.

Schrader, Tarantino recalled today, originally wrote “a critique of fascist revenge movies,” which ended up being “a fascist revenge movie.” “And I say yes, but it’s the best of the fascist revenge movies,” he added.

However, Tarantino assured that he empathizes with Schrader because he does not like what Oliver Stone did with his script in “Natural Born Killers” (“Natural Born Killers”, 1994).

“But some people really liked the movie like Johnny Cash, who I met in an elevator and he said he loved it. I told him that he was wrong ”, he emphasized, provoking laughter from the audience.

The director of “Pulp Fiction” also spoke about great masterpieces of cinema, such as “Taxi Driver”, and about his admiration for Brian de Palma. And also the subject of violence, so fundamental in his films, was another of the great axes of the talk.

I like violent movies he confessed, to the surprise of no one in the theater.

However, Tarantino explained that he does have a red line with violence in the movies: the mistreatment of animals or the real deaths of living beings, in general, including insects.

“It is a bridge that I cannot cross (…) I am not paying to see real death”, he said, since he considers a fundamental part of the fun of the violent to know that everything is false.

What there were no confessions about is his next film, the tenth of his career, which will have a film critic as the protagonist.

“I can’t tell you until you see the movie,” he said, and despite the encouragement of his audience, he felt tempted, he said, to start interpreting some monologues. “The same if there weren’t so many cameras”he held back.

WITH INFORMATION FROM EFE.