Revered filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has taken a look back at his filmography and named his favorite title as well as the one he considers his “masterpiece” and the one he was “born to make.”
The two-time Oscar winner, 62, has so far made a total of nine feature films throughout his career: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
During a recent appearance on The Church of Tarantino podcast, the famed director revealed that “Inglourious Basterds is my masterpiece, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is my favorite.”
Tarantino added, however, that he sees Kill Bill as the “ultimate Quentin movie, like nobody else could’ve made it.” The two-part martial arts action film was led by Uma Thurman as the Bride, a former assassin seeking revenge on her ex-lover and former colleagues who attacked her on her wedding day. It also featured Lucy Liu, the late David Carradine, and Michael Madsen.
“Every aspect about it is so particularly ripped, like with tentacles and bloody tissue, from my imagination and my id and my loves and my passion and my obsession,” he said. “So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make.”
As to why he considers Inglourious Basterds his masterpiece, he said it was his “best script.”
“And I think Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are right behind,” Tarantino said. “But, there’s an aspect of Hateful Eight that I actually think is probably my best directing of my material, i.e., the material is written and it’s solid. So it’s not like I have to create it, like Kill Bill, it’s solid, it’s right there and I actually think it’s my best servicing [of] my material as a director.”
For years, the legendary director has maintained his plan to retire after his 10th film.
He had originally planned for The Movie Critic to be his final film, but ended up scrapping it in April 2024. It was reported at the time that Tarantino “simply had a change of heart” and so he was “going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.”
On the podcast, he further explained he abandoned The Movie Critic after realizing it felt too similar to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“I wasn’t really excited about dramatizing what I wrote when I was in pre-production, partly because I’m using the skillset that I learned from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [of] ‘How are we going to turn Los Angeles into the Hollywood of 1969 without using CGI?’” he shared.
“It was something we had to pull off. We had to achieve it. It wasn’t for sure that we could do it,” Tarantino said. “The Movie Critic, there was nothing to figure out. I already kind of knew, more or less, how to turn L.A. into an older time. It was too much like the last one.”
