Quentin Tarantino gets very annoyed with Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy

Very unprofessional of Krishnan to try and debate the tired old link between real life violence and movie violence to a director whose bread and butter is violence and violent imagery - it was never gonna end well.

Tarantino was quite rude in parts but it showed restraint for him to bring the interview back on track before the end. Had Krishnan tried that with someone like Oliver Stone.. I wonder how it would have went down.

Basq wrote: »

Very unprofessional of Krishnan to try and debate the tired old link between real life violence and movie violence to a director whose bread and butter is violence and violent imagery - it was never gonna end well.

Tarantino was quite rude in parts but it showed restraint for him to bring the interview back on track before the end. Had Krishnan tried that with someone like Oliver Stone.. I wonder how it would have went down.

Why would he? The majority of Stones films are about the consequences of war and violence so there is no comparison between him and someone with a adolescent mindset who thinks its all a great laugh, even his non war ones like Natural Born Killers are a satire on media hypocrisy over violence.

Technocentral wrote: »

Why would he? The majority of Stones films are about the consequences of war and violence so there is no comparison between him and someone with a adolescent mindset who thinks its all a great laugh, even his non war ones like Natural Born Killers are a satire on media hypocrisy over violence.

I'm basing it purely on the fact that both film-makers make violent movies..

.. I'm not analysing quality of work.

Da Shins Kelly wrote: »

In fairness, Tarantino's movies are complete fantasy, sometimes revenge fantasies. It's not exactly rooted in any realistic depiction of the workings of the world where there are consequences for certain behaviour. He's never pretended to do anything like that either. He has always admitted that his movies are somewhat fantastical and unrealistic.

Thats a bit of a copout, not necessarily from you but from him and his most vociferous defenders, fantasy or not a lot of his work is repugnant.

snausages wrote: »

Well the way I see it Tarantino's films are there just to allow viewers to act out socially unacceptable tensions in a safe environment. The unreality of the violence makes more obvious that it isn't an endorsement of actual violence in real life. I've never found anything troubling about his work, except that some of its is awfully self-indulgent and nowhere near as clever or subversive as he might hope.

Course, when you look at it that way his films can become something of a communal **** session for him and the audience.

Yeah, "catharsis" was something he mentioned a couple of times in that interview and you can really divide his career into two sections: There was his "classic era" with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and then there's been his "exploitation era" which is everything after that. It is pretty damn noticeable that every movie of his exploitation era has taken a protagonist from some marginalized social group (women in Kill Bill and Death Proof, Jews in Inglourious Basterds and black people in Django Unchained) and put them up against an iconic representative of the people who have dehumanized or disempowered these groups: a patriarchal figure who thinks he can decide how she can live her life in Kill Bill, a predatory male in Death Proof, Nazis in Inglourious Basterds and slaveowners/traders in Django Unchained.

The idea seems to be to make that section audience feel a little empowered. Inglourious Basterds even rewrote history to give the Jews the empowering ending that Tarantino obviously thinks WW2 lacked - instead of the Jews being rescued from the Holocaust by some foreign nation, the Jews are saved by fellow Jews in spectacular fashion. Basically, they are able to save themselves instead of needing to be rescued. That Kill Bill interview video that someone posted earlier included Tarantino saying that The Bride is a strong role model for young girls and you know what? I agree with him. Kill Bill is remarkable for being an action movie which is completely and utterly devoid of the Male Gaze and is not obviously written with a male perspective. At no point are there titillation shots of a woman's tits or ass, the mother/whore dichotomy doesn't show its face, the Bechdel Test passes with flying colors, and "don't call me babe" moments are non-existent. The Bride kicks EVERYONE'S ass and aside from Bill himself, who is male only because the story requires him to be B.B.'s father, practically every serious threat is female and similarly not defined by their gender (except O-Ren perhaps). If it were one isolated film (or pair of films as the case may be), I might dismiss Tarantino's success at empowering a marginalized group a happy accident. But given that it's a pattern that has been quite consistent ever since, it's safe to say that Tarantino does see his depiction of violence as necessary for "audience catharsis".

Which is all a really long way of saying "Yes I agree it seems to be a communal **** session for him and the audience, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing".

Technocentral wrote: »

Good to see that at least one other person here has reservations about the "oh, isn't it so cool and funny to blow people away in graphic detail" crap he makes, he's like a teenage boy. I have no problem with films that show horrible violence as long as the consequences of it are also shown or at least alluded to in some way (recent example would be Munich where it showed the physiological toll of constant killing). Its not just his films or other equally violent ones in the US, its their adoration of guns in all the media and society in general that leads to so many gun murders but he certainly isn't helping the situation.

I don't see any reason why an artist should excuse or explain their work, or feel any need to engage with social responsibility.

In fact, I'd rather see Tarantino produce a film that contains horrible violence with no respect paid to the potential consequences and do a great job of it, than to see a director throw out a poor, dramatic and preachy construction of the consequences of killing.

Of course, a good director can do a great job of the latter as well, but there's plenty of room for both, and for all the talk of Tarantino being a self-indulgent director, I've never felt like any of his political or social principles were being thrust at me.