(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Making a successful film in Hollywood can often be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, great, you’ve made a movie that is connected with the masses. On the other hand, oh dear, you’re in a profit-driven industry and now have studio executives breathing down your neck, pressuring you to bring back to life a story that you considered passed. This is the curse of the sequel, and it’s something that many a good filmmaker has fallen victim to, and it’s why Quentin Tarantino refuses to watch one particular movie.
Making a sequel to a film that isn’t just fan service can be tricky. An extended version of that difficulty is making a trilogy. If you have been asked to turn one film into a series of three, creating something that remains cohesive yet engaging and keeps an audience guessing can be incredibly tricky. During an interview with Bill Maher, Tarantino spoke about what a trilogy should be and the only one out there that he deems to be perfect.
“I think there’s only one trilogy that completely and utterly works to the nth degree,” he said, “And that’s Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly… It’s one director’s vision, Sergio Leone, but the thing about it is, it does what no other trilogy has quite been able to do.”
Tarantino went on to speak about the fact that films in trilogies shouldn’t just be continuations of stories, but they should project a story to new heights. “The first movie is terrific, but then the second movie is so great, and takes the whole idea to such a bigger canvas that it obliterates the first one,” he said, “And then the third one, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, does the same thing to the second one. And that’s kind of what never happens. You’ll see this big jump from the first to the second, and they don’t really land the third one.”
Tarantino then went on to talk about films which he doesn’t think stick the landing. Mad Max gets a mention, as while he doesn’t talk badly about the trilogy, he said he thought Thunderdome felt a little bit flat compared to the other two, and he isn’t alone in this criticism. However, he then goes on to speak about a third film he believes does work, and it comes from a trilogy that people might struggle to accept the violence and foot-obsessed director would be familiar with.
“In the case of Toy Story, the third one is just magnificent; it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. And if you’ve seen the other two then it’s just devastating,” he says, before criticising the franchise, “But the thing is, three years later or something, they did a fourth, and I have no desire to see it.”
This is a common problem for famous franchises: regardless of how good an ending might be, the guaranteed fanbase (and subsequent payday) that is promised by bringing a story back to life is too tempting for many people to resist. Surely, Tarantino understands this, but it doesn’t make him any more likely to go and see Toy Story 4.
“You literally ended the story as perfect as you could,” he said, “So, no, I don’t care if it’s good. I’m done. I am done. It can still be good, but I’m done.”
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