The Surprising Answer to Which of His Movies Is Tarantino’s Favorite

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“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is my favorite, Inglorious Basterds is my best, but I think Kill Bill is the ultimate Quentin movie, like nobody else could have made it,” the director said. “Every aspect about it is so particularly ripped — like with tentacles and bloody tissue — from my imagination and my id and my loves and my passion and my obsession. So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make, I think Inglorious Basterds is my masterpiece, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is my favorite.”

Tarantino has written and directed ten features so far —, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), the two-volume Kill Bill (2003 and 2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglorious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came (2019). Tarantino believes that his later work had the best writing, but he never achieved the same synergy between writing and directing that he had on Kill Bill.

“I think Inglorious Basterds is my best script, and I think Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are right behind,” he said. “But, there’s an aspect of Hateful Eight that I actually think is probably my best directing of my material, i.e., the material is written and it’s solid. So it’s not like I have to create it, like Kill Bill, it’s solid, it’s right there and I actually think it’s my best servicing [of] my material as a director.”

Tarantino has often said that he will end his time as a writer-director with one more film, and here, he said that he passed on directing The Adventures of Cliff Booth specifically because he didn’t want his swan song to be a sequel. He even said that he scrapped a project called The Movie Critic because it was too similar to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as well.

“I wasn’t really excited about dramatizing what I wrote when I was in pre-production, partly because I’m using the skillset that I learned from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [of] ‘How are we going to turn Los Angeles into the Hollywood of 1969 without using CGI?’” he said. “It was something we had to pull off. We had to achieve it. It wasn’t for sure that we could do it… The Movie Critic, there was nothing to figure out. I already kind of knew, more or less, how to turn L.A. into an older time. It was too much like the last one.”

Tarantino’s full interview is available now on most major podcast platforms for those interested. His movies are scattered across streaming services at the time of this writing, but those who want to check out his favorite can digitally rent or purchase Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on PVOD stores.