We knew Quentin Tarantino had a thing for Kung Fu movies — anybody who’s seen the Kill Bill movies could have told you that — but we didn’t know he liked them this much.
During a recent chat with the folks of the Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino waxed poetic about the martial arts genre for a whopping two hours and 35 minutes. That’s about the entire runtime of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but instead of a movie, it’s just Tarantino talking about Kung Fu movies. Here’s how Pure Cinema describes the episode, titled “Kung Fu Cinema with Quentin Tarantino.”
Quentin Tarantino returns to the Pure Cinema Podcast with a special new episode dedicated to his passion for Kung Fu cinema. Special guest Dan Halsted, diehard film collector and head programmer at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, joins the Oscar-winning filmmaker, Pure Cinema hosts Elric Kane & Brian Saur, and the New Beverly’s social media manager Phil Blankenship for a wide-ranging discussion about martial arts movies, with a special focus on the films Quentin has reviewed recently for the New Beverly website.
Tarantino talks about how he first fell in love with Kung Fu movies when he was a little boy, as that is when the genre first began to pick up steam. He recalls going to the movies and seeing the trailer for the 1972 film Five Fingers of Death, which starred Hong Kong martial arts movie trailblazer Lo Lieh, and it kind of blew his mind. Unfortunately for him, however, he was almost immediately sent to live with his grandparents in Tennessee for a full year, and their lone local theater didn’t show any Kung Fu movies. But Tarantino’s fascination didn’t go away, and he would go to the library and read the newspaper weekly to see what Kung Fu movies were opening in the nation that week. Remarkably, he is still able to remember many of these dates today.
The podcast is full of fun little anecdotes like that, and you can listen to the entire thing below.
