Everyone knows that Quentin Tarantino is little short of a verbal machine gun when it’s your turn to talk about movies. His adolescence spent behind the counter of a video store gave him the opportunity to watch as many movies as one can imagine. And among them, the a director that may sound familiar to you: Pedro Almodovar.
“I want to do stuff like that”
On The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Tarantino said last year that ‘Matador,’ and more specifically its opening scene, modeled his cinema. Yes, yes, as you hear it: without tricks of any kind, the American director fell in love with manchego and his daring.
When the movie starts, in the opening credits, there’s a guy sitting in a chair in his living room. His pants are down to his ankles, and he’s masturbating. And what he’s jerking off to are the bloodiest, most violent scenes in slasher movies. He has all his favorite moments of women being killed, all together. And he is jerking off! And that’s the opening scene.
Imagine the surprise of a Tarantino who in 1989 could not find anything similar in his country outside of art and essay. He was absolutely fascinated by the wild of Almodóvar in his fifth film (the first that, by the way, reached a million euros of collection).
I remember sitting at Video Archives and saying, ‘I want to do shit like this when I make movies.’ And one of my classmates was like, ‘But they’re not going to let you, Quentin,’ and my response was, ‘Well, who are they? Who are they to tell me what I can or can’t do? And at the end of the day, I never let them stop me, I did what I wanted to do, and by doing what I wanted to do, we changed the ’90s.
Can we say that ‘Reservoir dogs’ or ‘Pulp fiction’ would not exist without Almodóvar? It’s too risky a statement.but frankly, at this point, why deny ourselves the pleasure of believing that it would be so?