QT8: The First Eight – 21 Years: Quentin Tarantino (2019)

Directed by: Tara Wood | 101 minutes | documentary | Starring: Zoë Bell, Louis Black, Bruce Dern, Robert Forster, Jamie Foxx, Richard N. Gladstein, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Diane Kruger, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Eli Roth, Tim Roth, Kurt Russell, Stacey Sher, Scott Spiegel, Christoph Waltz, Quentin Tarantino

We live in dark times. Not because of a virus or the fact that gory violence has been shown in cinema since ‘Reservoir Dogs’. No: ‘Can we still separate Quentin Tarantino’s work from the monster called Weinstein?’, some media wonder. The makers of ‘QT8: The First Eight’, a documentary about the master’s first eight feature films, don’t mind after-meal mustard, letting us easily share in the genius of Quentin.

OK, it’s Hollywood hagiography, but some deserve it. ‘QT8′ is a handy piece of work when it comes to summarizing the highlights of Tarantino’s oeuvre. Many protagonists have their say, in the service of the moment Quentin granted them – not the other way around. All those so-called B-actors, such as Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and Robert Forster, should be interviewed more often like here; Madsen in particular has good things to say about the Weinstein affair. “It’s the end of an era.”

Several careers were brought upside down by film buff Tarantino. ‘John Travolta was talking to babies when he became Vincent Vega’, it sounds like. And did you know that Clarence dies in the original script of ‘True Romance’? That was of course not possible in the Hollywood of 1993. A year later Tarantino had Vincent Vega already halfway through ‘Pulp Fiction’. Quentin had turned the film world upside down with his Nouvelle Violence to such an extent that the star could disappear in the middle of the story, and the audience swallowed it.

Actually, that’s a more impressive result than the viewer’s continued acceptance of violence, which isn’t just attributable to QT and serves a purpose at best. As in ‘True Romance’, the beating of Alabama (Patricia Arquette) when she refuses to betray Clarence (Christian Slater) eventually becomes romantic precisely because it is portrayed in detail – one of the best scenes in cinema history.

NB: This documentary was initiated in 2016 under the auspices of the Weinstein Company. After the bankruptcy, the production company that took over the estate (Lantern Entertainment) stopped selling the film and maker Wood took the film back under management for production.