Despite the fact that Clint Eastwood is more than 30 years older than Quentin Tarantino, the two seem like contemporaries. This connection began in 1992, when the release of Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Western film Unforgiven heralded a career renaissance for the filmmaker, while Tarantino made his feature directorial debut with the crime film Reservoir Dogs, which revealed the director to be a distinctive and exciting new voice in cinema.
More than 30 years later, the filmmakers are both poised to ride off into the proverbial sunset with their respective career-ending feature directorial outings. Eastwood has announced that his final film as director will be the upcoming courtroom thriller Juror No. 2, while Tarantino has said that his final film as director will be the upcoming drama The Movie Critic.
While the pair have never formally collaborated in a professional sense, Eastwood and Tarantino are nonetheless linked by their mutual respect for each other’s work and shared influences. This relationship began at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, where Eastwood heartily endorsed Tarantino’s sophomore feature directorial outing, the groundbreaking 1994 crime film Pulp Fiction, which, following its triumphant Cannes launch, became the most influential film of its era.
Clint Eastwood Is a Great Judge of Talent
Quentin Tarantino first attended the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, when his stunning feature directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, was screened out of competition at one of the festival’s adjacent theaters. However, when Tarantino returned to the festival in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, it had already generated a considerable amount of buzz and was considered to be a prime contender for the festival’s ultimate Palme d’Or prize.
Moreover, Clint Eastwood, one of Tarantino’s ultimate screen idols, was the jury president for the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. While he and Tarantino hadn’t met prior to the commencement of the 1994 festival, Eastwood had heard about the buzz regarding Pulp Fiction and was excited to see the twisty crime film. Pulp Fiction was also helped by the fact that it was screened in competition alongside a particularly lackluster group of festival films.
Regardless, upon its initial screening at the festival, Pulp Fiction generated rampant excitement among audiences and the members of the Cannes jury, especially Eastwood, who found the reaction to Pulp Fiction to be nothing short of amazing. Pulp Fiction immediately became the heavy favorite to win the coveted Palme d’Or award. Of his initial reaction to Pulp Fiction, Eastwood said:
“I was amazed it was the European guys on the jury [who] really started jumping. A couple of them turned around and said, ‘That’s the best picture. That’s the picture of this festival.’ I didn’t jump on it. I was still kind of weighing things in my mind. But it was definitely interesting, and it was exciting, and it came at a time when we needed a little excitement, because it came right after a couple [of films] that were lulling.”
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The filmmaker’s endorsement and the subsequent awarding of the Palme d’ Or prize to Tarantino intensified the anticipation for Pulp Fiction, which was screened at Cannes approximately five months before its theatrical release. Following its wide release, the film became a cultural phenomenon and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture.
The Dollars Trilogy Influenced the Kill Bill Franchise
Quentin Tarantino has said that he intended for the Kill Bill franchise, which presently consists of the films Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, to emulate the structure of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy Western film series.
In 2004, upon the release of Kill Bill: Volume 2, Tarantino stated that he was planning a third Kill Bill film, which ostensibly would have completed his alternate version of the Dollars Trilogy series.
While Tarantino teased the possibility of a third Kill Bill film for over 15 years, he has said that the exhaustion he experienced while making the previous films is one of the reasons why he didn’t make a third film. Regardless, the director’s supposedly impending retirement obviously makes the completion of a Kill Bill trilogy seem highly unlikely.
Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino Are Linked By Their Admiration for Sergio Leone
While Clint Eastwood first achieved fame with the Western television series Rawhide, he gained film stardom with Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy Western film series, beginning with the classic 1964 Spaghetti Western film A Fistful of Dollars. Moreover, through the Dollar Trilogy series, the filmmaker found his first and most prominent lifelong film-making mentor in the legendary Leone, whom Tarantino cited as one of his foremost directorial influences.
The Western genre is arguably Tarantino’s favorite film genre, and no one stands taller, so to speak, within the genre than Eastwood and Leone. Tarantino has credited the director’s The-Man-With-No-Name antihero screen persona in the Dollar Trilogy with altering the perception of the Western genre by redefining the screen image of the cinematic action hero through his incomparable physical presence.
While Tarantino’s 2012 revisionist Western film Django Unchained was most directly inspired by longtime Leone friend and rival Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Western film Django, Leone’s influence is nonetheless present throughout the film, especially with the film’s soundtrack, which includes three songs from Leone’s longtime musical collaborator, famed Italian composer Ennio Morricone.
Morricone later wrote an original score for Tarantino’s 2015 Western film The Hateful Eight, which brought Morricone, who died in 2020 at the age of 91, his first and only competitive Academy Award. Morricone’s previous Honorary Academy Award was presented to Morricone in 2007 by Eastwood.