Quentin Tarantino - Influences and Style of Filmmaking

Influences and Style of Filmmaking

In an awards ceremony in the Critics Choice Awards celebrating Tarantino, citing his start in filmmaking in his 20s. Music is an important part of his filmmaking style. He said he would listen to music in his bedroom and create scenes that correlated to the music playing.

In the 2002 Sight & Sound directors' poll, Tarantino revealed his top 12 films: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Rio Bravo; Taxi Driver; His Girl Friday; Rolling Thunder; They All Laughed; The Great Escape; Carrie; Coffy; Dazed and Confused; Five Fingers of Death; and Hi Diddle Diddle. In 2009, he named Kinji Fukasaku's violent action film Battle Royale as his favorite film released since he became a director in 1992. He is also a fan of the 1981 film Blow Out directed by Brian DePalma, so much so that he used the main star of the film (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction.

In August 2007, while teaching a four-hour film course during the 9th Cinemanila International Film Festival in Manila, Tarantino cited Filipino directors Cirio Santiago, Eddie Romero, and Gerardo de León as personal icons from the 1970s, citing De Leon's "soul-shattering, life-extinguishing" movies on vampires and female bondage, particularly Women in Cages. "It is just harsh, harsh, harsh," he said, and described the final shot as one of "devastating despair". Upon his arrival in the Philippines, Tarantino was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, "I'm a big fan of RP (Republic of the Philippines) cinema." He often uses graphic violence that has been proven seductive to audiences and has received harsh criticism for his use of gore and blood in an entrancing simultaneously repulsive way. His films have been subject to staunch criticism and scorn for his use of violence, blood and action as a "colour" within cinema, rebuked for allegedly using human suffering as a punchline.

Actor Steve Buscemi has described Tarantino's different style of film making as "bursting with energy" and "focused," a style that has earned him many accolades worldwide. According to Tarantino, a recurring hallmark in all his movies is that there is a different sense of humor in each one, which gets the audience to laugh at things that aren't funny. Michael Winner, whilst appearing on an episode of Piers Morgan's Life Stories (an ITV production), stated that Quentin Tarantino was a "big fan" of Death Wish.

Director Quentin Tarantino has admitted that the celebrated animation-action sequence in his 2003 film Kill Bill was inspired from the use of 2D animated sequences in from actor Kamal Hassan's Tamil film Aalavandhan. Tarantino often seeks to harness, manipulate and ultimately imitate the aesthetic elements and conventions typically used in the cartoon medium. More specifically, he often attempts to meld comic strip formulas and aesthetics within a live action film sequence and in some cases uses the literal use of cartoon or anime images. Tarantino's cinematic ambition to marry artistic expression via live action and cartoonism is yet another example of his ability to morph genres and conventions to produce a new and authentic style of his own.

Tarantino often manipulates the use of commodities to propel plot development or present an intriguing juxtaposition that ultimately enhances his notorious combination of humour and violence, equating a branded genre with branded consumption. He often pairs bizarre props with an equally bizarre scene, in which the prop itself develops into something of higher substance. Likewise, he often favors particular brand names of his own creation to make promotional appearances. The typical brands he uses within his films are "Acuna Boys Tex-Mex Food", "Big Kahuna Burger", "G.O. Juice", "Jack Rabbit Slim's", "K-Billy", "Red Apple cigarettes", "Tenku Brand Beer", and "Teriyaki Donut".