Quentin Tarantino has been firing up the cameras for years to film such greats as Inglourious Basterds, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction in addition to a slew of others that fans could list forever. The author of Cinema Speculation sat down with Bill Maher for a recent Real Time with Bill Maher special and talked about his greatest moviegoing experience. It changed him in a huge way, and he’s been trying to recreate that moment with his movies ever since.
When he was 8 years old, Quentin was taken to a double-feature where he watched Jim Brown star in 100 Rifles. There was another movie that played first called, The Bus Is Coming, but that one didn’t go over well for the audience. Quentin learned a few expletives that evening, and he got involved in the pure contempt of the movie himself. It was when 100 Rifles came on the big screen that everything changed for the young Quentin.
“Being taken to a Jim Brown movie at an all-Black theater, that was the most masculine experience I have ever had,” the legendary director explained. “Either as a movie consumer or when creating movies for an audience, that goal of a Jim Brown movie on a Saturday night in 1972 is what I’m trying to recreate.”
The masculinity of the movie and the audience’s reaction to it was an experience for him that was better than camping or fishing. Men can bond doing those things, but for Quentin, it was watching this action-western that also stars Raquel Welch and Burt Reynolds. Quentin doesn’t mention their names because it was Jim Brown, the first professional athlete turned actor to be taken with any kind of seriousness that did it for the young Q.
Quentin has recreated that type of masculinity in movies like The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained, and Natural Born Killers. He has also made some feminine badasses in Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill franchise. Has he achieved what he has been trying to recreate? That would be a good follow-up question for Bill Maher.
