Quentin Tarantino is asked again and again in interviews which of his films is really his best. Of course, critics and audiences have their own favourites. But how does the Maestro see it? So far he has remained silent. But radio legend Howard Stern got him to talk on his “SiriusXM” show.
“I’m often asked that, and most of the time I come up with the well-known child comparison,” Tarantino said on the show when asked about the unloved question. “But honestly, I think ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ is my best film.”
So the cat is out of the bag: it’s not his debut “Reservoir Dogs” and the Cannes hit “Pulp Fiction” that make the director proud, but his complex homage to a dream factory that no longer exists and in which he tells the story about the simply had the murdering Manson family rewritten.
Star roles for Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, a shimmering 60s feeling – that was worth 10 Oscar nominations (ultimately there were two awards, one for Pitt and one for scene design). But among fans, the film never scored as well as the “Kill Bill” series or “Django Unchained”.
Quentin Tarantino settles accounts with the contemporary film
So why “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”? Well, maybe because Tarantino reconstructs a film world in it that he sorely misses today. The 59-year-old recently dismissed the current era as the worst in Hollywood cinema.
“Even though I saw more movies (at the cinema) in the ’80s than ever since, I believe the ’80s combined with the ’50s is the worst era in Hollywood history,” Tarantino said in a video for his Video Archives Podcast. “But all of this will still be beaten by the present time, by the calculation of time that has now begun.”
The director admitted that there is still something good about the decline of film culture. “Films that want to do something completely different stand out a lot more.”