When we talk about Auteur, referring to a director, we mean someone who has a personal and distinctive style who make him recognisable to the audience because of their particular vision and particular use of different techniques. Auteurism is how the director expose his vision through the camera with his stylistic choices of the film, they can be compared to painters with their own singular vision of reality.
One of the directors who I consider an auteur is Quentin Tarantino. In every of his movies there are always several components that will make you understand who’s the creator of it. It’s not just about the camera work, even if it does play a part, it’s the entire structure of his movies that is recognisable, form the violence to the humour, to the intense dialogue to the non-linear plots.
One of his most iconic piece of work is, without any doubt, is Pulp Fiction (1994).
In this incredible movie is easy to recognise his style. Tarantino wants to tell us three different stories that somehow are connected with each other. The first one is about Vincent Vega ( John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield ( Samuel L. Jackson ), two hitman who are going to experience a quite crazy day. The second one still involve Vincent, but this time he’s with Mia Wallace ( Uma Thurman ), Vince’s boss’s wife for a fun night out, that end up with her going on Heroin Overdose. The third and last one is about Butch Coolidge ( Bruce Willis ) who’s a fugitive boxer who, somehow after a series of events finds himself punching his way out from a pawn shop basement.
Those stories though are not showed in a linear sequence, they jump from one to another, mixing the present with the past and it really want the audience to pay attention to what are they watching or they’ll get lost very, very easily. This doesn’t happen just in this Tarantino’s movie, among the most it also happens in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Hateful Eight (2015). Tarantino really loves to mix up the story a little bit. Another feature that make a Tarantino movie a TARANTINO movie is the use of humour and extreme violence combined together. The perfect example is the “Big kahuna burger”. The scene has a “bitter sweet” flavour. It can confuse the viewer very easily when Jules is having a chitty chat about the Hawaiian burger with the guys who he’s going to shot couple of minutes later.
What is also fascinating in that scene, like all the others, and that make it an original Tarantino’s is the dialogue. Being not only a director but a writer too, he looks in detail to dialogues and how to make the script fits perfectly to the character. You can understand a lot about his characters by the way the show themselves and the way they talk to each other.
