Here’s a detailed look at Quentin Tarantino's obsessive film fandom

It’s no secret that Quentin Tarantino loves movies. In fact, “overenthusiastic film nerd” is pretty much his whole brand. And the YouTube channel Now You See It explores that fact in an 18-minute video essay about Tarantino’s genre-hopping oeuvre. Made up entirely of film clips and pre-existing interviews, the video opens with Tarantino describing his directorial aesthetic as “finding the poetry between the lines” of clichéd genres—an idea he picked up from a 1966 Pauline Kael essay about Jean-Luc Godard. The rest of the video is then loosely framed around another interview in which Tarantino discusses his three “desert island films”: Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

The video examines all of Tarantino’s filmography, but focuses most specifically on Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, with shorter explorations of Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, and Reservoir Dogs as well. (Be warned, there are spoilers for all of Tarantino’s films throughout.) In addition to Tarantino’s three desert island films, the essay also touches on a whole bunch of other Tarantino influences, which include everything from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly to Disney’s The Aristocats. Given that it’s made up of pre-existing interviews, none of the information revealed here is new. But Now You See It does a remarkable job of both finding and editing disparate, era-spanning footage into a streamlined narrative. To see just how much work goes into an essay like this, Now You See It also shared the 46 pages of sources, research, and outlining for the video.

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