Quantity is King: How Tarantino’s Unique Filmmaking Ethos Reveals the Problem with Hollywood
The idyllic image of northwest Los Angeles as the proverbial La-la Land of American hopes and dreams is a mythos of universal appeal. One that by pure force has managed to generate a global image as the mecca of glamour, celebrity, filmmaking, and the American Dream. Despite the endurance of this image, the trending cynicism of the 21st century has demanded a millennial review of what remnants of the Hollywood myth still remain.
According to even the great industry insider himself, Robert Redford, ‘Hollywood is not the same as when I first entered the business,’ and by this admission a deflating truth about the state of modern Tinseltown is confirmed.
What was once the playground of Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, has in recent decades been reduced to yet another home of corporate profiteering and design by committee, where algorithms, not auteurs, dictate the direction of the industry. This unfortunate (but probably inevitable) devolution of Hollywood has most irkingly manifested in franchise culture, but this article’s focus will instead be on an example of quality over quantity in filmmaking: the filmmaking ethos of the divisive Quentin Tarantino.
Aside from his often-self-aggrandising flamboyances there is little doubt over Tarantino’s hefty influence over the style, purpose, and scope of so many of the 21st century’s filmmakers. His penchant for blockbuster casts of icons and newcomers, the characteristic gratuitous violence and gore, the meticulous and impossibly niche references and callbacks to the history of each genre he incorporates, and the distinctive vibrancy of his characters and the worlds they live in, have had an indelible impact on the imaginations of modern up and coming creatives.
One defining feature of Tarantino’s artistic mindset that has yet to migrate across the industry, however, is his self-imposed 10 film cap; a discipline of quality over quantity from which Hollywood must learn a valuable and possibly lifesaving lesson.
Prior to the unprecedented industry collapse during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, the rate of film production in the USA was on a steady upwards trajectory; a trajectory that was likely to continue if not for the intervention of a global pandemic. Whilst it would be impossible to claim that COVID was anything short of a disaster for the creative industries, it did temporarily halt a concerning trend in rampant, mass-produced entertainment.
In 2018, 872 movies were released in North America. Of this 872, 200 were adaptations, sequels, or franchise instalments of pre-existing cinematic properties.
This tendency for Hollywood and the major film production companies to consistently rely upon the box office successes of the past, above the promotion of new and progressive voices, has produced a lethargy that is costing the industry and medium its reputation and creative potential.
It was universally acknowledged that 2018 was far from a stellar year for movies and, whilst of course there are notable exceptions, its failures epitomized a culture in Hollywood where quantity is King, where the director is an employee, and the true creative agency lies in the boardroom.
Therefore, Quentin Tarantino’s release of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood in 2019 revealed a stark and depressing contrast to the vast vast majority of the surrounding years’ productions, when even one of the least realised titles of the director’s catalogue could stand out so boldly as an example of organically creative cinema.
In fact, the director’s entire filmography, and his very outlook regarding cinema, displays a deep-seated issue at the heart of Hollywood and the American movie industry, wherein an auteur whose works primarily consist of a mishmash of cinematic references could stand out as a generation-defining figure. That his work, however undeniably impressive, would be regarded as commanding a force in 21st century cinema is perhaps the greatest testament to the void of new and progressive mainstream cinematic figures, and as a consequence represents the productively disciplined ethos of the director as one which must desperately be adopted by the industry to save itself from a corporate suicide.
Of course, as has been the frequently tiresome subject of discourse, the buck stops at the franchise studios of the late 20th and early 21st centuries whose ravenous appetite for sequels, prequels, and spinoffs has driven the ever-widening gap between the modern film industry and the qualities and values of its past.
This may be a romantic view of history and its imagined superiority, when perhaps the same capitalist vices that contaminate the contemporary creative arts have always done so, but this romantic interpretation of cinema’s past is nevertheless one that Quentin Tarantino, in all his self-contented wisdom, wholeheartedly invests in.
It is in this way, more than any other, that he, his work and his attitudes to filmmaking differ most starkly from other directorial voices and industry peers. There exists in this wilful naivety a sincere and genuine affection for the prideful values of the cinematic form and its history that earnestly disavows the director from falling foul to too strong an economic impulse. That’s not to say that Tarantino is some ostracized creative purist whose efforts have garnered no financial reward, far from it, but rather it is by the very product of his hyper-focused interest in honest and passionate creative output that his movies pay their dues, critically and economically.
No better is this laser focus on the creative qualities of his work and their place in the cinematic canon exemplified than with his now famous self-imposed retirement date, set at the completion of his tenth film. Whilst the time and name of this much-anticipated final production remains a mystery, after rumours that it would be titled The Movie Critic and star Richard Jewell and BlacKkKlansman’s Paul Walter Hauser were wholeheartedly dismissed earlier this year, theories over exactly how the director could fittingly cap off his cinematic career have, for years, captured the public’s imagination.
The mystique garnered by this key decision to put a cap on his own productive future is one sadly rare in modern cinema, where creativity is treated as a resource and a commodity rather than the closely guarded and carefully handled faculty that, by its very premise, the 10-film-rule understands. This discipline, however pompous, is a breath of fresh air and one from which the industry as a whole desperately needs to learn from as its ever-accelerating output increasingly begins to seriously backfire.
It has become apparent in very recent years that the once unparalleled profitability of franchise culture is in the last stages of its bloated and sickly lifetime and that the great adaptation experiment will almost certainly die in the long term. Therefore, if we can depend on Hollywood at all we must now, in a stage of post-Marvel domination, depend upon it to take forward lessons from Tarantino to once again allow narrative-led movies, with genuine artistic voices driving the reins who prioritize authentic creative quality above corporate capitalist motivations, to hold market supremacy.
Central to such a transformation would be an adoption of that very appetite for creative refinement core to the so-called ’10 movie-rule’, a practice of self-discipline very likely to have saved quite a few contemporary filmmaking ‘legends’ from an unfortunate latter career. Of course, to expect so much from what is ultimately a money-making industry is certainly unrealistic. However, if Hollywood does have any ambitions on a flourishing creative and economic future, it would unquestionably do well to take some inspiration from its favourite son, Quentin Tarantino.
It would be entirely wrong to conclude that the 61-year-old is the sole hope for the future of cinema, as in truth the years following the pandemic have produced a fresh and re-energized sub-culture of popularly successful independent films, spearheaded by overseers such as A24 and Neon. Instead, perhaps it is from his example and dedication to authentic cinematic expression and his commitment to high production quality that these filmmakers of the future could learn to break the corrosive trends of the present.
Written by Evan Meikle
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