Even before he finished his own so-called final film, Quentin Tarantino had already started carving a personal canon for everyone else. After unveiling his 11–20 picks on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast — a beautifully deranged stretch that ran from “Battle Royale” to “West Side Story” — he finally rolled out the top 10, a list that put war cinema, animated heartbreak, paranoid thrillers, and down-and-dirty genre work on the same altar, with “Black Hawk Down” sitting at number one.
Talking about Ridley Scott’s Somalia-set war insurgency mission film, he admitted it took time to realize how hard it had lodged in his brain. “I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve,” he said, before calling it “a masterwork” and “the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling.” On a recent revisit, he said “my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie” and summed it up as “a feat of direction [that] is beyond extraordinary.”
His number four pick, “Dunkirk,” was another case where first contact left him almost overloaded. He said the initial viewing was “so kind of gobsmacking, I didn’t really know what I saw, it was almost too much,” but that rewatching it “again and again and again” unlocked the film’s design. By the third and fourth time through, he said it “just blew me away” and praised the “real mastery” he felt once his brain could actually process what Christopher Nolan was doing.
Third place, “Lost in Translation,” came with a confession that sounded half crush, half cinephile swoon. “I fell so much in love with ‘Lost in Translation’ that I fell in love with Sofia Coppola and made her my girlfriend [laughs],” he said. “I courted and wooed her, and I did it all in public; it was like it was out of a Jane Austen novel.” He said he talked about the film with Pedro Almodóvar, and that they agreed it was “such a girlie movie, in such a delicious way,” adding, “I hadn’t seen such a girlie movie in a very long time, and I hadn’t seen such a girlie movie like that be so well done.”
Eighth place went to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which he almost skipped out of stubborn loyalty to Mel Gibson. “I was actually not going to see it for the simple reason that in a world where Mel Gibson exists, and he’s not playing Max? I want Mad Mel!” he said. Weeks of people telling him he was wrong — including his editor Fred [Raskin]— finally pushed him into a theater. “Then I saw it,” he said. “The great stuff is so great, and you’re watching a truly great filmmaker; he had all the money in the world and all the time in the world to make it exactly as he wanted.” For Tarantino, that was the awe of George Miller’s film: watching someone finally get the resources to stage the inside of their head.
The rest of the list could have doubled as a film-school curriculum. He slotted Lee Unkrich’s “Toy Story 3” at number two and raved about its heartbreak and trilogy-ending perfection; Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” landed at five as a near-masterpiece he still couldn’t resist poking at; at six, David Fincher’s “Zodiac” was his slow-burn discovery, a film he said he liked more every time it ambushed him on cable. Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” at seven became, in his mind, one of the director’s great “last movies,” a runaway-train B-movie elevated into a monster film. In ninth and tenth place, Edgar Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead” and Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” rounded things out with a proper mix of horror-comedy and time-travel nostalgia.
Here’s the full top-10 as he laid it out:
- “Black Hawk Down” (Ridley Scott)
- “Toy Story 3” (Lee Unkrich)
- “Lost in Translation” (Sofia Coppola)
- “Dunkirk” (Christopher Nolan)
- “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson)
- “Zodiac” (David Fincher)
- “Unstoppable” (Tony Scott)
- “Mad Max: Fury Road” (George Miller)
- “Shaun of the Dead” (Edgar Wright)
- “Midnight in Paris” (Woody Allen)
