For the legendary director Quentin Tarantino, there is no better film than Spielberg’s thriller classic Jaws from 1975. However, with one caveat: The film is not great art.
Quentin Tarantino is one of the most popular active directors, but he is also a huge film fan himself. As a child, he re-enacted movie scenes with his action figures, and in his youth, he worked at a video store.
His legendary gangster film Pulp Fiction is ranked 10th among the best films of all time, according to IMDb, but Tarantino has a completely different favorite: The thriller Jaws by Steven Spielberg from 1975.
In the film, the fictional coastal town of Amity is terrorized by a gigantic man-eating shark. The local police chief, along with a marine biologist and a shark hunter, tries to catch the predator.
Jaws was a huge success at the time, grossing $470 million and winning 4 Oscars. It is not only considered the first example of the “animal horror film” genre but also established the “summer blockbuster” (via MoviePilot).
Tarantino distinguishes between entertainment and art
What makes the film so good for Tarantino? As the director revealed in the Cinemablend podcast, Jaws is the greatest film of all time for him.
In the original quote, Tarantino distinguishes between the words “movie” and “film.” The terms are used almost synonymously in English, but some differentiate between films that are primarily about entertainment and those that are primarily artistically valuable.
For Tarantino, Jaws is therefore the best entertainment film of all time, but not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece:
I believe Jaws is the greatest entertainment film ever made. Maybe not the greatest art film. But the greatest entertainment film. […] As far as entertainment films go, no one does it better than Jaws. There is no “better” Jaws.
Tarantino compares Jaws to a rubber band that is stretched just before breaking – for the actual star of the film, the shark, appears very little in the movie: Its appearances total about 4 minutes, about 3% of the entire runtime (via The Daily Jaws).
This may have also been due to technical problems during filming, but it also allows fear of the creature to be gradually built up – after all, there is hardly anything scarier than the unknown.
Other favorites of the cult director include films like Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese and Carrie by Brian De Palma. From the 11 films that Tarantino listed as his favorite films in a list published in 2022, the most recent is Blow Out by Brian De Palma from 1981 – the others mainly date from the 40s to the 70s.
Tarantino forbade Christoph Waltz from participating in the rehearsals for Inglourious Basterds
