Quentin Tarantino names the most underrated director in history: “One whose movies I can show anyone and they are just blown away”
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Ever since he burst onto the scene as one of the most vibrant and exciting talents in independent cinema when Reservoir Dogs took the festival circuit by storm in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino has never been one to keep his opinions to himself.
For better or worse, the auteur has always been happy to tell people exactly what he thinks about anything and everything related to the movie business. There are directors he adores and abhors, actors he idolises and despises, and films he’s obsessed with and nonplussed by.
One of the many signatures Tarantino has developed through his career is homaging the pictures he loves in his work. Whether it’s from a needle drop on the soundtrack, a line of dialogue, a character’s costume, or a shot composition, the two-time Academy Award winner has been dubbed cinema’s most successful magpie for a reason.
Some of the directors he cherishes the most are among the biggest names of their respective eras – whether it’s Brian De Palma, John Woo, Steven Spielberg, Sergio Leone, and Billy Wilder – but there are others who could be called deeper cuts from the long and illustrious history of the silver screen.
One such name is William Witney, a prolific talent who specialised in genre flicks during a half-century in the business that spanned from 1930s serials to 1980s westerns via action, blaxploitation, comedy, and more. He was a fixture on television, too, helming episodes of several shows that directly influenced Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, including The Virginian and Laramie.
“I’ve found directors I like, but William Witney is ahead of them all,” Tarantino told The New York Times. “I think it’s so cool that he began as the king of cowboy serials and ended with a black exploitation film. That’s a career, man.”
He’s also described Witney as “one whose movies I can show to anyone, and they are just blown away.” Tarantino has outlined his appreciation for the B-tier maestro on multiple occasions and even bestowed on him a badge of honour that would have no doubt included people who may not be familiar with Witney’s work to check out at least a couple of his movies, based entirely on Tarantino’s recommendation.
When he met with Burt Reynolds, one of the first things on his mind was to pick his brain for the actor’s recollections of Witney, who he’d worked with back in the 1950s. The Pulp Fiction mastermind called him “one of the most underrated action directors in the history of Hollywood,” a sentiment that Reynolds agreed with wholeheartedly. Witney may not be a household name like some of the other directors Tarantino has constantly praised over the years, but earning the label from a die-hard genre aficionado like him as the most underrated orchestrator of high-octane action sequences to ever step behind the camera is high praise indeed.
Related Topics
