Question: Why does an "indie" director like Quentin Tarantino, who has one million-dollar grossing movie on his resume, get more publicity and Hollywood buzz than other directors like Stephen Sommers, who's directed two $200 million grossing films in a row? "” Kendall
Flickchick: Because money isn't interesting, unless all you're interested in is money. Not to pick on Stephen Sommers, but you chose him as your example, so he's going to have to take the brunt of this diatribe. Although Sommers, who directed the hugely successful Mummy movies, gets lots of work by virtue of being predictable, reliable and accessible, he's not the least bit interesting. He's a masterful purveyer of mainstream Hollywood product, stuff that fills up movie screens, brings patrons into the proximity of concession stands and delivers minor variations on tried and true formulas, their fundamental hollowness concealed by the latest technical bells and whistles. His movies make a ton of money because they're supported by mega-marketing campaigns, saturation advertising and cross-platform tie-in promotions that generate a huge want-to-see factor that isn't even about wanting to see the movie. It's about feeling you have to see the damned thing because it's all anybody's going to be talking about. Stephen Sommers makes movies by formula. He tells interviewers he likes Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz movies, the Thin Man series and the original Boris Karloff Mummy (1932), but if he's ever had an interesting thought about them, he's kept it to himself and there's no trace of their influence in the movies he's made. Sure, The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001) are painless enough to watch, but there isn't one single frame of either of his mummy movies that sticks with me, whereas there are at least half a dozen lines and images from the Karloff version that haunt me to this day.
Quentin Tarantino, by contrast, is a geyser of movie-related knowledge, opinions and enthusiasms. He makes movies that reflect his own obsessive love of movies and popular culture, from Hong Kong exploitation pictures, to TV series like The Green Hornet, Honey West, Kung-Fu and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to Blaxploitation movies, noir classics, Italian Westerns and gialli, German krimis, go-go music, biker flicks, American outlaw filmmakers like Sam Fuller and forgotten journeymen like William Witney, soul and funk singers, French new wave movies, classic Hollywood trivia, comic books, vampire pictures, serial-killer chic, samurai movies, Mexican wrestling and all the not-quite-A-list actors he loved as a moviegoer: Robert Forster, Lawrence Tierney, Pam Grier, Michael Brandon, Sonny Chiba and Michael Madsen. He's got off-the-wall opinions, passionate loves and hates and a deep-rooted need to share what he loves with everyone else. He's eminently quotable, his enthusiasm is infectious, and there's more sheer, propulsive energy in any five minutes of Pulp Fiction (1994) or Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) than in the entirety of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns combined. You come away from Tarantino's movies wanting to see all the things that influenced them. And that's why writers love to write about Tarantino and movie insiders are always buzzing about him "” they can never be sure what he's going to do next, which might be to fall flat on his ass or might be to make the movie everyone will spend the next 10 years trying to imitate.