Yes, it’s yet another edition of Quentin Tarantino sniping his way through Hollywood on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, where the filmmaker and the cantankerous novelist-screenwriter compare notes on their favorite films of the 21st century and inevitably end up throwing a few punches along the way. Much like Ellis, Tarantino can’t help but undercut his praise: every great movie comes with a caveat, a “giant flaw,” or at least some poor soul who gets singled out as the weak link.
Previously, we delved into his take on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” where he essentially declared Paul Dano the weak element preventing it from being his number one film of the century, calling the performance the “weak sauce” within a near-masterpiece. Now, after going through the rest of the conversation, we land on Tarantino’s assessment of Woody Allen’s “Midnight In Paris,” which also makes his list. As usual, he can’t just leave it at admiration; he uses the film to air out a long-standing dislike of Owen Wilson and then pivots into a broader critique of Allen’s one-movie-a-year process, which he says has left the director churning out what feel like filmed first drafts.
Tarantino actually starts from a place of affection, calling “Midnight In Paris” “endlessly funny” and talking about how he has seen it multiple times. Then he drops the line seemingly engineered for pull-quotes: “Oddly enough, I really can’t stand Owen Wilson. I mean, I can’t stand him.” He explains that the first time he saw the movie, he “spent the first time watching the movie loving it and hating [Wilson].” On a second viewing, he tried to soften, telling himself, “Don’t be such a prick, he’s not so bad.” By the third time, Tarantino says he found himself “watching him,” which is about as close as he gets to a full-throated endorsement of Wilson’s performance.
From there, the conversation zooms out to Allen’s 21st-century run, which many critics dismiss as a fallow period. Tarantino pushes back, pointing to titles like “Match Point,” “Scoop,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and “Blue Jasmine” as evidence that, for a while, Allen was delivering “one classic after another” even while cranking out a film a year. At the same time, he draws a sharp line between the movies Allen “toils over” — he cites “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” emphasizing the importance of collaborator Marshall Brickman and the extensive re-writing those films went through — and what he bluntly calls “first draft movies” like “Alice” that feel less worked over by comparison.
“If you want to know how Woody Allen does it, how Woody Allen writes these scripts, like, you know, one a year, for so long?” Tarantino asks. His answer is not especially flattering: he argues that Allen is “not really writing movies” so much as “writing short stories that he expands to feature length,” essentially filming first drafts. As a writer himself, Tarantino wonders what would happen if Allen actually took one script and put it through “draft two, three, four.” In his mind, the results could be extraordinary, but Allen seems more interested in finishing something, moving on, and keeping the assembly line going.
That’s why “Midnight In Paris” stands out to him. Tarantino suggests that, compared to the rest of Allen’s 21st-century work, this one “looks like he actually might have written a third draft.”
In the end, it’s a classic Tarantino two-step: elevate a movie into his personal canon while simultaneously slicing into its star and its director’s entire working method. Even when he’s praising “Midnight In Paris,” he can’t resist turning it into a case study in what he thinks Woody Allen usually does wrong — and why, just this once, the alchemy of script, execution, and concept finally clicked.
