In addition to demarcating his top ten movies on The Brett Easton Ellis Podcast, he also became a critic while critiquing and coining Paul Dano as ‘weak sauce’. Yes, we’re talking about Quentin Tarantino. Before that, he declared Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” to be the greatest film of the twenty-first century, praising Scott’s “feat of direction [is] beyond extraordinary.” The director shared his top ten choices (via World of Reel).
Lee Unkrich’s “Toy Story 3” (number two), Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (number three), Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (number four), Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (number five), David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (number six), Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” (number seven), George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (number eight), and Edgar Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead” (number ten).
Tarantino remarked regarding his choice of “Black Hawk Down” as his top selection, “I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve. Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently; my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie. It had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”
In a more startling disclosure, Tarantino stated that he did not genuinely appreciate Nolan’s “Dunkirk” when he first viewed it. He currently ranks the film as his fourth favourite of the century.
“What I now love about it is that I feel there’s a real mastery to it, and I came around to it watching it again and again and again,” he said. “The first time, it’s not like it left me cold — it was so kind of gobsmacking, I didn’t really know what I saw, it was almost too much, and then the second time I saw it, my brain was able to take it in a little bit more, and then the third time and the fourth time, it was just like, wow, it just blew me away.”
While stretching towards his top 20 movies, one of Paul’s earlier films, 2007’s There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, was on the list. Quentin really disliked Paul’s dual role as identical twins Eli, despite enjoying the film overall.
On the podcast, Quentin loved the movie and Daniel Day-Lewis and said it could’ve been further up on his list (he ranked it at No. 5) if it wasn’t for Paul. “There Will Be Blood would stand a good chance at being #1 or #2 if it didn’t have a big, giant flaw in it … and the flaw is Paul Dano. Obviously, it’s supposed to be a two-hander, but it’s also drastically obvious that it’s not a two-hander,” he said. “[Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister. Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role. He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. The weakest f-cking actor in SAG [laughs].”
This isn’t the first instance where Quentin is dwelling on Paul and his acting abilities in the movie. Previously, he stated that his characterisation of the twins was not awful, but it “does seem a compromise.” He stated more thoroughly, “He’s just not in the level and the caliber and the caliber of Daniel Day-Lewis and if the two characters are meant to be combats throughout the film, then Daniel Day-Lewis is Muhammed Ali and Paul Dano is Jerry Corey. It is what it is.”
