What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name? Quentin Tarantino belongs? In addition to refined dialogues, allusions to (underground) film history and eclectic soundtracks, violence is certainly one of the central features of his films – and has been so from the beginning.
In his (real) debut film ‘Reservoir Dogs’ you see, among other things, how a police officer’s ear is cut off before the film ends in a true bloodbath. The cult director’s later films weren’t exactly squeamish when it came to brutality either – there isn’t actually a Tarantino film that doesn’t have fountains of blood spewing out or corpses littering the ground at some point.
Once more “Kill BillAs the director revealed during a conversation at the Cannes Film Festival, he too has limits – even though he’s already had body parts chopped off and heads exploded…
This is Quentin Tarantino’s red line
‘I have a big problem with killing animals in films’ said the 60-year-old. “It’s a bridge I can’t cross. Insects too. Unless I’m watching a bizarre documentary, I don’t want to pay for real death. An important part of the violence in my films is that it is fictional. That’s why I can tolerate the violent scenes, because we’re all just hanging out. An animal – a dog, a llama, a fly or a rat – is concerned about your film. I would kill a million rats, but I don’t want to kill a rat for a movie or see it killed in a movie because I don’t pay to see real death.”
Although it is probably up his alley, Tarantino obviously cannot do much with a film like ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, for which a turtle, a monkey and a pig, among others, lost their lives.
Tarantino is currently working on ‘The Movie Critic’, which he says will be his last film. The main character would be an amateur film critic who reviews popular films for a porn magazine. The extent to which this premise is appropriate for violent scenes is just one of many open questions that we can eagerly await the answers to in the coming months and years.