Filmmakers Can't Wait for Superhero Genre to Die, According to Tarantino
Iconic American director and author Quentin Tarantino has joked that filmmakers are dreaming about the day superhero movies are no longer popular.
"Just as 60s anti-establishment auteurs rejoiced when studio musical adaptations fell out of favor, today's filmmakers can't wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies," the award-winning director said in his interview with The Los Angeles Times.
When can this happen? Well, according to the Pulp Fiction director, "the writing's not quite on the wall yet," but "the way it was in 1969 when it was, 'Oh, my God, we just put a bunch of money into things that nobody gives a damn about anymore,'" Tarantino said.
When asked by LA entertainment columnist Glenn Whipp why Tarantino never volunteered to shoot a superhero movie for DC Comics of Marvel, the director said he was not "looking for a job."
"You have to be a hired hand to do those things," Tarantino explained. "I'm not a hired hand. I'm not looking for a job," the Inglorious Basterds director told Whipp.
The two talked about the film industry, Quentin Tarantino 's new book Cinema Speculation and the films the director watched when he was a kid. In the book he particularly shares his experience of watching them. Tarantino has been thinking about writing the book for years. Originally it should have been just an appreciation of films he holds so dear. But it materialized into a survey of movies that inspired a "point of view worth talking about," he says.
Tarantino confessed that there are two movies, which he shouldn't have watched in his childhood. And if you think he means some horror or gore-infested stuff you are wrong.
"I think Bambi is well known for traumatizing children," Tarantino says. "It's a cliché, but it's true. The only other movie I couldn't handle and had to leave was at a drive-in in Tennessee. I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. So for me, Last House on the Left and Bambi are sitting on the f— shelf right next to each other. Both take place in the woods. And both had me saying, 'I gotta get out of here!'"
Tarantino admitted that he liked Star Wars and recalled how he was carried away with the movie characters and when the lights were turned on he looked around and "had that moment of recognition, thinking, 'Wow! What a time at the movies!"
Still, now he prefers a little bit different type of cinema with a bigger idea like Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he says is "an epic for regular people, not just cinephiles."