Quentin Tarantino has been making the rounds to promote the release of Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood on home video and while speaking to Consequence of Sound, he gave an update on his Star Trek movie, how he almost wrote Halloween 6 way back when and also shared his thoughts on Rob Zombie’s often maligned Halloween films.
Though he hated the first movie initially, the director says it eventually grew on him and now he counts himself a big fan of both, explaining:
“I am a big fan of the Rob Zombie Halloweens. When I saw the first one, I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the aesthetic. I didn’t like everything that he added to it and then the last hour just becomes this fast forward remake of the first one. What the fu*k is all this shit? Eight months later, I watched it on video … and I really liked them once I got all the preconceptions out of my head. That kid [Daeg Faerch] is really good. I mean, what did I think Rob Zombie was going to do with it? Do I want him to do something else? I like his Sam Peckinpah aesthetic. So, now that I didn’t have a bug up my ass about it, I was actually able to appreciate it. And again, it’s that kid who got me into it, and Danielle Harris is fantastic.”
Zombie’s Halloween films are definitely something. They were made at the height of the torture porn era in the mid-to-late ‘00s and many, myself included, were not a fan. The fact that Tarantino zeroes in on the performance of a kid and compares Zombie’s movies to Sam Peckinpah is interesting, though. Spoken like a true filmmaker.
Honestly, I could listen to Tarantino talk about movies for hours, and he’s always coming from a place of fandom rather than as some pretentious director. I mean, he said his favorite film of the year is Crawl, a creature feature with man-eating alligators. I doubt that’s on any critic’s top ten list let alone their top movie of the year.
As any actor will tell you, Tarantino is a walking cinema encyclopedia. He watches everything and he’s got hot takes and cool ideas for tons of movies. He says he’s only directing one more film though and if that’s true, I think he should still at least host a show or podcast. After all, we’ve seen filmmakers who started out as critics, but what about the other way around?