Did Quentin Tarantino just put Paul Dano into the alpha league of the world’s most loved and admired movie actors?
His recent insults aimed at Dano counterprovoked a flood of defensive praise, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Dano’s costar in There Will Be Blood, publicly endorsing it. But was Tarantino’s pronouncement just bluster and flex? Will he end up casting Dano in his next film – a turnaround like Donald Trump making nice with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after pretty much threatening him with nuclear war? Or are we witnessing a kind of midlife emotional crisis in the heart of one of the most brilliant directors of his generation? I speak as a superfan with reservations.
In his recent podcast interview with the legendary controversial author Bret Easton Ellis – and therefore perhaps in a mood to provoke and épater les bourgeois de la critique – Tarantino unveiled his top 20 best films of the 21st century. Asked why Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was only at number 5, Tarantino declared that Dano was the problem: “[Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister … He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy.”
Hmm. This isn’t an accurate assessment of Dano. But it could be that Tarantino’s feelings about Anderson are in any case more complicated than that.
The top 10 half of his picks is an almost ostentatiously normie list, a Letterboxd civilian list, in reverse order: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, David Fincher’s Zodiac, PTA’s There Will Be Blood, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 and Ridley Scott’s wartime action-thriller Black Hawk Down at the very top. Well, OK. No one should patronise a cinephile connoisseur like Tarantino by dismissing this selection as populist – almost all of them are absolutely great, although I am baffled by the inclusion of Tony Scott’s dire Unstoppable.
Is Tarantino trolling the wokesters by including Woody Allen? I would have gone for Allen’s Blue Jasmine. I am not every bit as saucer-eyed about Miller’s Mad Max revivals as other people, but they’re certainly really good, and Scott’s Black Hawk Down is a wildly impressive two-hour-plus action sequence – but, please, Scott’s Gladiator is surely a better film. As for the others: yes, absolutely great – and on a patriotic note, it’s nice to see Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, which way back at the beginning of the 00s revived self-respect for the British film industry.
It is certainly not the hipster-obscure selection that you might expect, certainly from, say, reading Tarantino’s fascinating memoir Cinema Speculation.
The more recondite titles (and non-English-language titles) come in the 10 lower down, in reverse order from 20 to 11: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, Prachya Pinkaew’s Chocolate, Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass: The Movie, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves, and Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.
That seems more to be the QT we know and love. There’s Fukasuku’s badass survival-reality masterpiece Battle Royale – which Tarantino correctly says was ripped off by the Hunger Games franchise – the Thai martial-arts actioner Chocolate and the Israeli horror-thriller Big Bad Wolves. I agree with Tarantino that Spielberg’s West Side Story is great (although here too Tarantino is a bit salty about the cast: “I couldn’t believe I liked the lead [Ansel Elgort] as I didn’t like him in anything else” ). I like his praise for Brad Pitt’s movie-star mystique in Moneyball, although Pitt is far better in Tarantino’s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’m not down with Roth’s Cabin Fever or Zombie’s tiresome Devil’s Rejects, and Gibson’s Passion is a non-sacred turkey fit only for the culture wars. Linklater’s School of Rock is great fun, but only a contorted inverse snobbery pose can put that in there and not Linklater’s real masterpiece, Boyhood.
But we’re back to Paul Thomas Anderson and There Will Be Blood; Tarantino wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t aware of PTA’s status as a rival to his own and of Anderson as a film-maker who seems to be creating work with more fluency and productivity than Tarantino right now, and he might have picked a quarrel with Dano on the spur of the moment just to take PTA down a few pegs.
Tarantino recently said that his next film and perhaps his last film would be a project entitled The Movie Critic – now reportedly shelved – inspired by the LA Times’s Kevin Thomas, who Tarantino loved growing up: the guy entrusted with the popcorn fare that the main critics wrinkled their noses at. This intriguing and amusing list, in which commercialism and cinephilia are such a complex mix, may in fact constitute the “movie critic” performance that his abandoned film was going to be.
So how does Tarantino see himself now? Does he think he has one big masterpiece left in him? I think he does. More than one, probably. He has said he doesn’t want to go on past 10 films, having so far made nine, and said that a great master like Don Siegel should have quit while he was ahead after Escape from Alcatraz in 1979.
But the time has come for QT to stop sulking in his tent, stop making irrelevant pronouncements on podcasts. Tarantino created this 10-film idea; he certainly can’t quit at nine films – but there’s an enormous amount of self-imposed pressure. This 10-and-no-more thing has pointlessly paralysed him, and his Dano outburst is just a symptom of that. My prediction is that Tarantino will go for an adaptation, his first since Jackie Brown: he will find a novel and supercharge the pulp with shock and flair. And Paul Dano will be in it.
