QUENTIN TARANTINO NAMES JAWS GREATEST 'MOVIE' EVER MADE
Quentin Tarantino is one of the most influential writer / directors ever. He is a meticulous student of cinema with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film that allows him to blend classic genres to create something never seen before.
So when Quentin Tarantino appeared on Jimmy Kimmel earlier this year to promote the novelisation of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, it was no surprise that the conversation quickly turned to movies.
Kimmel tested Tarantino’s B-movie knowledge by reading out VHS sleeves of long forgotten movies to see if he could guess the movie from the description. Unsurprisingly, a blindfolded QT guessed most of them correctly.
While discussing movie novelisations, the Reservoir Dogs director brought up the literary reworking of ‘Jaws rip-off’ Orca (1977) written by Arthur Herzog. Tarantino explained how the characters in Herzog’s book are vastly different to the film resulting in a much richer story and experience.
This in stark contrast to Jaws with Steven Spielberg detesting the characters in Peter Benchley’s book to the point that he was rooting for the shark. To fix this, Spielberg recruited his friend and ‘The Odd Couple’ writer Carl Gottlieb to make the movie version of the characters more likeable.
Orca (1977) often gets compared to Jaws , not just because they share the aquatic ‘creature feature/monster’ genre, but also the way the story unfolds with both crews venturing out to sea to face their respective foes and both captains meeting their fates on those doomed voyages.
“I think Jaws is maybe, possibly the greatest ‘movie’ ever made.”
Quentin Tarantino’s hand written list of his greatest movies
When comparing Jaws and Orca himself, the Kill Bill creator gave some perspective on the debate by saying “When it comes to judging Orca vs Jaws … I think Orca is a very good movie. Its a really good movie. I think Jaws is maybe, possibly the greatest ‘movie’ ever made. But Arthur Herzog’s novel of Orca is much better than Peter Benchley’s novel for Jaws.”
High praise indeed for what many consider the best movie ever made from one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. You can watch Quentin’s full interview with Jimmy Kimmel below.
Words by Ross Williams
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