Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Tarantino in Ten

    Quentin Tarantino recently made the official announcement that he’ll be retiring from directing after his tenth film. Counting Kill Bill volumes I and II as a single installment, that means Django Unchained was his seventh, and after his next - appropriately titled Hateful Eight - he’ll have two more left before calling it a day.
    Tarantino, an obsessive cinephile, reasons that many famous directors overstayed their welcomes, tarnishing their legacies with sub-par late offerings (i.e. Billy Wilder’s forgettable late ouvre).
    Tarantino, whose first film Reservoir Dogs was an indie smash that jumpstarted one of the most prolific careers in modern cinema, in a talk with international film buyers this week said “I don’t believe you should stay on stage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game”.
    So if Tarantino is correct and a director only has ten relevant films in him, let’s look to some of cinema’s masters to see what this means.

STEVEN SPIELBERG
    The American equivalent to SeƱor Spielbergo’s first ten films represent some of the best movies ever made, including Jaws, E.T., The Color Purple and the first three Indiana Jones movies (I omitted his contribution to the Twilight Zone Movie, Spielberg’s Four Rooms). If he was to quit after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade however, we’d have been deprived of Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln, to name a few — although he would have avoided the few missteps of his career in Hook, A.I., and the dismal fourth Indiana Jones installment.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
    Amidst a few early efforts for which he was either uncredited, or otherwise meddled with by studios, Uncle Frank’s ten ends at about the Godfather Part 2. So that means we get two of the best films ever made, as well as the underrated The Conversation, but we lose Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Similarly to Spielberg  and Indiana Jones though, it turns out revisiting The Godfather for a third chapter was a misstep.

STANLEY KUBRICK
    Kubrick, like Tarantino was actually quite selective, and after his first ten (including Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: a Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange) the director only completed three more films: The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, so yeah, we’ll take ‘em.

JAMES CAMERON
    Believe it or not, Avatar was only Cameron’s eighth feature, which include The Terminator and its sequel T2:Judgment Day, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies and Titanic. If he quits after ten that means we’ll get Avatar 2 and 3, but not part 4, which might result in blue balls either way.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK
    I have literally never heard of any of Hitchcock’s first ten, which were all produced in the Hollywood heyday of assembly line film production and were made in less than five years. After such forgotten works as The Pleasure Garden, The Lodger, The Farmer’s Wife, The Manxman and Champagne (ooh-la-la!), Hitchcock went on to direct the films he’s really known for, including Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, The Birds and Dial M For Murder, so it’s safe to say cinema as an entire medium benefitted from the old man sticking with it for the lon haul.

MARTIN SCORSESE
    Omitting his many documentaries, Marty has had an amazing career with a first ten that includes Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Raging Bull and The Color of Money. Although it’s hard to imagine the past thirty years without Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, as well as non-crime dramas like The Last Temptation of Christ, The Aviator and Hugo. Though I did think The Wolf Of Wall Street blew the big one, so I could take it or leave it.

JOEL COEN
    Perpetually in collaboration with his brother Ethan, Joel Coen is the one who technically directed most of the Coens’ flicks. Similarly to Tarantino, the Coens established their aesthetic right out of the gate with Blood Simple, and refined the black humour that would come to define their work a few years later with Raising Arizona (All Hail Nicolas Cage). While I have personally found Joel and Ethan’s work to be hit-or-miss, it would be a shame for their last film to have been the sleeper Intolerable Cruelty, when No Country For Old Men, A Serious Man and True Grit were still just twinkles in their fathers’ eyes.

MICHAEL BAY
    The Liberace of unnecessary Pyrotechnics’ first film was Bad Boys. His tenth was 2013’s Pain and Gain. I don’t think anybody would miss Transformers 4, but maybe we could just have cut him off at one?

So what have we learned? It’s easy for Tarantino to cap it at ten, considering his first film was an indie anomaly, and he didn’t have to spend the requisite years directing studio crap to get his big shot. There are definitely big-name directors who could have stood to be more choosy with what projects they took on, and revisiting early success years after the fact can be downright calamitous. But overall, directing isn’t just a young man’s game* but a craft that can take years to master and even longer to perfect. It’s easy for Tarantino to say that he’s going to leave at the top of his game when he’s essentially autistic in the way that makes great movies, but if most of today’s top directors had quit after ten, we’d have missed out on some of the most important films of our time.

Besides, we all know Quentin's not **actually** going to retire, right?

*Nor is it just a man’s game. I acknowledge that I failed to include any females, but prominent female director Kathryn Bigelow only has ten directing credits; Nora Ephron eight; while Sophia Coppola and Julie Taymor each have five. This is an unfortunate result of an outdated studio system that uses “tradition” as an excuse for suppression, but that’s a whole other article.