Quentin Tarantino Defends His Obvious Love Of Feet

Quentin Tarantino has had such a huge influence on modern cinema that his name long since became an adjective, with any crime thriller featuring a sprawling ensemble cast, back-and-forth dialogue laden with pop culture references and a fractured timeline being described as ‘Tarantinoesque’.

Of course, very few of the pale imitations can come close to matching one of the most distinctive filmmakers of our time, who gifted audiences with a string of classics dating back decades including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, the two-part Kill Bill saga, Django Unchained and more.

For the most part, you know exactly what you’re going to get from a Tarantino movie; burst of graphic violence, eloquent monologues, intricate plotting, unexpected performances from actors subverting their established personas and a carefully curated soundtrack, to name but a few of his signatures. Oh, and feet. Lots of feet.

There are entire YouTube videos dedicated to all of the lingering closeups of feet peppered throughout Tarantino’s filmography, and in a new interview with GQ he addressed if and why his obvious fetish has played such a large part in his on-camera efforts.

“I don’t take it seriously. There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies. That’s just good direction. Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel, another film director. And Hitchcock was accused of it and Sofia Coppola has been accused of it.”

Of course, Tarantino has earned the creative, cultural and cinematic cache to do whatever he wants with his projects, so nobody’s going to step in and tell him that all of his characters must be permanently wearing shoes at this point of his career. He’s only got one more feature left to luxuriate in his fandom of the foot if he sticks to those long-held retirement plans, so it’s not a line of inquiry he’ll have to deal with for too much longer.