Recently, Quentin Tarantino made headlines around the world after openly and gratuitously criticizing actor Paul Dano. In his list of the best films of this century, the director highlighted There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, a film he loved, but in which he disliked seeing Dano. What the director said couldn’t be clearer: “Supposedly it’s a film about two characters. But it’s also very clear that it isn’t. [Dano] is weak, man. He’s the weaker brother. [ Daniel Day-Lewis ] is devouring him alive,” he asserted.
These statements generated a lot of controversy, and many came to Dano’s defense. The fact is that Tarantino has never been one to mince words, and whenever he wanted to criticize something publicly, he did so bluntly.
“I went to the cinema to see it once and had to leave. It was like a terrible sitcom.”
One of the most notorious cases was Natural Born Killers, a film directed by Oliver Stone that adapted an original screenplay by Tarantino. The filmmaker was at the beginning of his career, so he sold the script because he was unable to find funding to direct it himself. Knowing the director’s temperament, imagine what it meant for him to see his beloved script end up on the big screen in the hands of others.
“Basically, they rewrote my script. That’s the first one, and I think you can stop there,” he declared in a radio interview with Opie & Anthony. “What bothers me is that I know people… Hollywood screenwriters rewrite all the time, and it always happens, but not with me. The minute it happened, I said, ‘I’m not going to play this game.’ He didn’t have the right. I would have preferred he had stolen from me .” And it seems that, as he speaks, he gets heated.
I never sat down and watched the movie from beginning to end. I went to the cinema to see it once and had to leave. It was like a terrible sitcom.
This type of statement, made especially during the promotion of Natural Born Killers, did Oliver Stone a lot of harm. “All over the world, wherever we went, the criticism hurt us, because he said we had rewritten the script. He hadn’t even seen the film, but he criticized me, said things about my films. It was simply outrageous,” the director asserted.
It was an open war between the two filmmakers that, in reality, has neither a winner nor a loser. Perhaps Natural Born Killers doesn’t have as good reviews as films directed by Quentin Tarantino, but, at the same time, this and other comments are helping to portray Tarantino as one of the most controversial figures in Hollywood.
Source: Comic Basics
