TARANTINOCRACY
Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, actor, and writer / dasscinemag.com
Thirty-one years after the triumph of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino once again became the main star of the Cannes Film Festival. His audacious entrance onto the stage of the Grand Lumière Palace and the dramatic mic drop at the end of a brief but fiery speech caused a real sensation, sharply defusing the pompous atmosphere of the opening ceremony — a spectacle always calculated and politically charged. Palestine, Trump, and the global democracy that the great Robert De Niro called to defend while publicly lynching the American president from the Cannes stage — all of that instantly faded into the background after Tarantino’s stunt.
It was precisely this kind of provocativeness that earned him his «Cannes residency» back in May 1994. That year, Pulp Fiction won not just the Palme d’Or — it conquered the world, forever altering the cultural landscape and turning a 32-year-old upstart into its central figure.
After the premiere of Pulp Fiction, the audience spilled out onto the Croisette — stunned, confused, but with the sense that they had just witnessed a landmark moment in world cinema. Since then, this festival darling and child of fortune has become a Cannes regular — not only as a competing director, but also as a lecturer, curator, and honored guest.
Over the past three decades, his name has become synonymous with the word cinema, and any public appearance he makes is met with the closest scrutiny. This year, the author of Pulp Fiction was invited to the Riviera as a special guest to present a retrospective of two George Sherman westerns — Red Canyon (1949) and Comanche Territory (1950) — and to host a series of public film talks with film critic (and close friend) Elvis Mitchell as part of the Cannes Classics program.
However, at the last moment, the festival directors also recruited him to play the role of an eccentric emcee for the opening ceremony. Tarantino’s performance, as already mentioned, turned out to be just as sharp, clever, unexpected, and unforgettable as his films. This near-theatrical act was yet another reminder of why we love this passionate and partial filmmaker.
Being cast by Tarantino is akin to ascending to cinematic sainthood — and any actor who’s worked with him can attest to that. Tim Roth, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Buscemi, Christoph Waltz — they all owe their fame to him. In the hands of this towering figure with a perpetually astonished face, the camera becomes a set of keys to paradise. And in that paradise dwell the blessed and the heroic, as they should. This media paradise, of course, is an illusion — but no better one has yet been offered.
Despite their cult and popular status, Tarantino’s films still feel alien in any setting — but perhaps that says more about the setting than it does about Tarantino himself.
KING OF THE HILL
Tarantino’s greatest work is Tarantino himself: even when answering silly questions from journalists with just a few words, a squint, and his explosive laugh, he delivers a profound and unsettling truth about what it means to exist in this world. His wise foolery is, in every sense, cinema. He is loved, has been loved, and will continue to be loved — even if he stops making films altogether. Today, simply being Tarantino is enough. And that’s it.
Having shocked and delighted us for thirty years with his eccentric films, Tarantino, now in his sixties, has transformed into a brilliant writer (author of the novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the non-fiction Cinema Speculation — a mix of memoir, Hollywood history, and film diary), a cinema scholar, a lecturer, and a model father. So model, in fact, that he has vowed not to begin his final film until his son is old enough to carry memories of the set for the rest of his life.
«I’m in no rush to get started», says Tarantino. «I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Next month, my son turns five, and my daughter two and a half. When I’m in America, I write. When I’m in Israel, I’m a dad». After a string of high-profile romances that never led to something lasting (Mira Sorvino, Uma Thurman, Sofia Coppola), Tarantino finally found personal happiness with Israeli singer Daniella Pick. He is happily married (for the first time in his life), spending half his time in Tel Aviv.
DEATH PROOF
Contemporary cinema, desacralized by TikToks and social media, has been buried — by Tarantino himself. «What is a movie today? It’s something that plays in theaters for a symbolic four damn weeks. And by the second week, you can already watch it on one of the damn streamers».
Perhaps that’s why Tarantino — eloquent to the brink of indecency, brilliantly knowledgeable about cinema, passionately in love with it and unflinchingly outspoken — has taken an academic leave. Having announced what is essentially a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — The Further Adventures of Cliff Booth, with Brad Pitt in the lead — he reserved for himself the modest role of screenwriter, entrusting the direction to David Fincher. He, meanwhile, has turned to… theater.
If you’re wondering what I’m doing right now — I’m writing a play. And it’s a damn hard thing to do. I don’t know if I can pull it off. But it’s a challenge — a real challenge. Theater today is the final frontier for a director
Quentin Tarantino
THE MAN WHO IS POSTMODERNISM
The trend of postmodernism in cinema — with its detached play on kitsch and ketchup blood — has long since faded. The irreverent style that held nothing sacred seems to have lost its relevance. And yet Tarantino remains a cultural icon — a barbarian with a huge heart, an tireless explorer of cinema, its true custodian.
Tarantino is often labeled a postmodernist for his signature use of citation. But he’s not a postmodernist — Tarantino is postmodernism. He upended the entire value system, proving that Piranha 4 holds just as much cultural worth as, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey — he showed that everything is possible.
On the other hand, the dozens of bold imitators who tried to replicate his explosive style quickly ran into a serious wall. What makes Tarantino a genius is that he alone knows exactly where to borrow from — and, more importantly, how to make it entirely his own. Tarantino could have made Pulp Fiction and secured his place in cinematic history forever. But he went further, reinventing his own style.
First, he stopped quoting just his favorite films and began referencing world cinema as a whole. His movies — outwardly unchanged — began to house morality and depth. But his greatest achievement lies in discovering a previously unknown power of cinema: not only to alter the present or future, but to rewrite the past.
Having spent his life under the influence of others, Tarantino now exerts his own — shaping not only cinema, but the world itself. It is thanks to him that genre films have gained the status of high art.
LAUGHTER, CYNICISM, AND DEPTH
Tarantino is loved, first and foremost, for the funny. For his signature stylized violence with fake blood, for the always vibrant dialogue, for the music, the irony, and the cynicism. But all of this is just surface-level. Tarantino runs far deeper — subtler and smarter. He is a true poet. And also a melancholic, a fragile lyricist.
A master of blood-soaked burlesque, Tarantino began his career by rewriting, distorting, burying, and reviving film genres — from pulp crime fiction and Hong Kong action cinema with exploitation flair, to the Western and the war film. But even back then, what stood out was his unquenchable tenderness for cinema — a naive and pure belief in its power!
DEFENDER OF WOMEN
Few in contemporary cinema are as captivated by women — as devoted to praising and protecting them, even bringing them back from the dead. In Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and Death Proof, Tarantino tells the same essential story: a woman, once subjected to a man’s will and treated as his possession, rises up in rebellion and takes revenge — destroying him both physically and morally. And all this long before feminist agendas took center stage. It comes from the heart. Both the author and the viewer are unequivocally on her side.
Even in his debut film Reservoir Dogs (1992), he places a woman at the center of the story — without ever really showing her. The unlucky waitress stiffed on a tip by Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) is one of the key figures in this masculine tragedy. It almost seems as if the entire heist was doomed not because one of the gang was an undercover cop, but because these hardened criminals angered the gods (in the world of the film, that means Tarantino himself) by mistreating that poor waitress. And they were cursed.
The main offender, Steve Buscemi, receives a very specific punishment: in the next film — call it a reincarnation — Pulp Fiction, the stern but fair god Tarantino casts Buscemi in a cameo role as a Buddy Holly–lookalike waiter. Let him feel for himself what it’s like to live on tips.
Moreover, Tarantino’s avatar is almost always a woman. Want to find the filmmaker hiding behind one of his characters? Don’t get distracted by the cameos he plays himself. Look for the woman. She is the one behind whom Tarantino always hides. He is both Pam Grier in Jackie Brown and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. But perhaps his most precise self-portrait came in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, sitting in a movie theater, gazing with delight at herself on screen.
Tarantino’s cinema watches itself in the mirror (and the screen is a mirror): it is aware of itself as cinema, reflects on cinema, and confines itself to cinema as its only world of interest. The more perfect his films become, the less they contain of that vague, material plane we call real life. Fittingly, this universe was born from a flash of magical light in a dark movie theater.
THE MERCIFUL GOD
Tarantino is not an Old Testament god, ruthlessly punishing sinners. He is endlessly kind. For example, thanks to a clever narrative inversion in Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega — played by John Travolta and killed halfway through the film — reappears alive and unharmed in the finale, walking out of the diner in a gleaming white T-shirt, like an angelic robe.
On two occasions, he has brought women back from the dead: in Pulp Fiction, it’s Mia Wallace whom he revives from the other side with a syringe to the heart; and in Kill Bill, it’s the Bride — also played by Uma Thurman — who not only wakes from a years-long coma but literally rises from the grave.
With the same ease, Tarantino resurrects careers, bringing «fallen stars» back to the big screen — from John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, and Jennifer Jason Leigh to Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, and Daryl Hannah.
DINING WITH TARANTINO
No one in cinema speaks about food quite like Tarantino. There’s hardly an equivalent in film — and only Hemingway comes to mind in literature. Why do his characters discuss cocktails, hamburgers, rice, warm sake, coffee, and more?
First, because he loves to eat himself. But more importantly — to reveal the dynamics between his characters. Whether it’s Colonel Landa drinking milk in Inglourious Basterds or Jules tasting a burger from a frightened young man in Pulp Fiction — it signals that these are people backed by power and authority.
In that same Pulp Fiction scene where Vincent Vega takes Mia out to dinner, Travolta eats his burger with a knife and fork, while Uma Thurman grabs it confidently with her hands. Why? Because he’s heard too many cautionary tales — like the one about the guy who gave his boss’s wife a foot massage and got thrown out of a window for it — and is trying to be careful. She, on the other hand, is in charge. She can do what she pleases.
Or take DiCaprio in Django Unchained, sipping a cocktail — a display of his slave-owning dominance. Or the burger scene in Reservoir Dogs, when Tim Roth’s character is just beginning to infiltrate the gang. Or Aldo Raine — Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds — calmly eating his burger while watching the execution of Nazi prisoners in the woods, like a Roman emperor.
Why does food carry such symbolic weight in film? Probably because it’s one of the most universal experiences in life. A director’s mastery is tested in two areas — depicting sex and food. These require conveying the subtlest nuances. And Tarantino is a master. Through food, he manages to uncover the very core of his characters — their psychology, their intentions. In his films, food becomes a code that mirrors life itself.
TARANTINO SPEAKS
It often seems that in Tarantino’s films, the characters do nothing but talk. For cinema — the art of showing — that should be a fatal flaw. But Tarantino is a master precisely because he knows how to handle it. The endless chatter of his characters never makes the films tedious or robs them of momentum. His characters usually ramble about gastro-linguistic nuances, hidden meanings in pop songs, comic books, and other staples of pop culture — the raw material Tarantino constantly reworks.
These seemingly trivial conversations don’t drive the plot forward (that’s left to the action), but they reveal character, turning figures on screen into real, breathing people — not just narrative devices. Tarantino transforms dialogue into a dynamic attraction. You never know where a conversation will lead. Politeness, in his world, almost always ends in sudden brutality — and it’s all the more shocking when it comes from someone who seemed tactful and composed.
And there’s more: the dialogues in Tarantino’s films follow a certain rhythm. That rhythm is shaped, in part, by his favorite actor — Samuel L. Jackson — who almost always tweaks, polishes, and elevates the dialogue to a dazzling shine.
Having once lived under the influence of others, Tarantino has now spent three decades shaping both cinema and the world — making us a little happier with each new film.
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