When the double feature Grindhouse arrived in theaters in 2007 and ended up being a box office flop, it was a serious ego-denter for Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker had earned a mix of acclaim and success for his entire career, from Reservoir Dogs to Kill Bill, and he was shocked to discover that his audience wasn’t willing to follow him wherever he wanted to go creatively. It was a rough time for the writer/director, but he fortunately had a great Hollywood support system – and that included getting some wonderful advice from the legendary Steven Spielberg.
This past weekend, Tarantino recounted the mid-aughts career drama during an on-stage conversation at the Burbank Film Festival (via Deadline), and he explained that he specifically turned to his filmmaking elders for wisdom when people didn’t respond how he had hoped to his work on Death Proof (the feature that was paired with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror for the Grindhouse experience). He remembered that both Steven Spielberg and Tony Scott told him that he should be satisfied that he got to make the movie that he wanted to make – which he notes that he did – but the director of both Jurassic Park and Hook threw in some extra sage thoughts:
‘Quentin, you’re been pretty lucky. But the next film that’s a hit, you’re going to enjoy that more than all your other hits put together, because you’ve been here now. You know what it’s like to have a flop. The next time you have a hit, it’s going to be easy.’
During the on-stage conversation, Quentin Tarantino likened his audience rejecting Grindhouse to a break-up (“It felt like the moviegoing audience was my girlfriend and my girlfriend broke up with me.”), and it’s funny that Steven Spielberg’s advice is similarly applicable in romance: one doesn’t fully appreciate love until they have it and lose it, and rediscovering it can be magic.
Of course, sage advice gets extra bonus points when it turns out to be dead-on accurate, and that’s exactly what happened in Quentin Tarantino’s case. Audiences weren’t interested in the filmmaker’s homage to the rough-and-tumble cinema that inspired his love of the medium, and Grindhouse only made $50.2 million worldwide – but he followed it up two years later with Inglourious Basterds, and I probably don’t have to remind you that the World War II epic made $316.8 million during its global theatrical run. All of his features since – Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood – have earned nine figures .
Quentin Tarantino is 62 now, and theoretically could have years and years of great films (and box office hits) ahead of him, but he has said that he plans to retire from making movies after finishing his tenth feature… which is an unknown entity now that he has scrapped his plans to move forward with The Movie Critic. He’ll hopefully figure out what story he wants to tell next soon so that we can once again enjoy his brilliant cinematic vision (and that will hopefully also come with the revelation that he wants to continue making films forever).