Quentin Tarantino defends the large number of feet featured prominently in his movies. Tarantino recently released a novelization of his ninth film Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. He also openly pondered the possibility of retiring from moviemaking before releasing his long-promised tenth and final film.
It remains to be seen whether Tarantino will actually follow through on his threat to retire to a life of letters before releasing his tenth film. If he does decide to make a tenth movie, it will be fascinating to see what story he elects to tell for his promised final movie as a director. One thing is for sure though: no matter what Tarantino makes his last movie about, there will be a lot of shots of feet.
It’s of course been pointed out many times over the years that Tarantino enjoys putting shots of feet, and especially women’s feet, in his movies. Recently when the director spoke to GQ about his Once Upon a Time In Hollywood novelization, he got a chance to address accusations that he suffers from a cinematic foot fetish when the interviewer directly confronted him about the matter. Tarantino seemed slightly annoyed by the question, but did offer up an answer that is very Tarantino:
“I don’t take it seriously. There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies. That’s just good direction. Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel, another film director. And Hitchcock was accused of it and Sofia Coppola has been accused of it.”
It’s of course no surprise to see Tarantino automatically refer to himself as a “good director” and lump himself in with people like Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. He has never been accused of modesty. It’s interesting though that he also brings up Sofia Coppola, a contemporary of his and a woman, almost as if he takes the foot question as an accusation of sexism and feels the need to offer up a modern day female director who does the same thing.
One day someone may in fact go through every movie in history and count the number of gratuitous foot shots to answer once-and-for-all which director loved feet the most. But as of now, Tarantino is the one filmmaker most associated with shots of feet in movies, and it's not close. His fascination with that particular part of the human anatomy first popped up in Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s feet were a central visual element in the movie’s famous dancing scene, and only seems to have become more profound over the years. Once Upon a Time In Hollywood indeed upped the ante on Tarantino’s foot fascination as it featured loads of 1960s hippie girls without shoes, and gave the bare feet of actresses Margaret Qualley and Margot Robbie particularly bold showcases.
Critics of Tarantino will of course point to his female foot fetish as a sign that he’s a weird and somewhat creepy person whose films reflect a sexist point-of-view. Fans of Tarantino will obviously defend him by dismissing his foot fascination as a mere quirk. Ultimately, the foot issue is little more than an oddball side-note to Tarantino’s career, as his films possess more than enough real cinematic substance to stand on their own.
Source: GQ