You’d be hard-pressed to find a more passionate defender of the video era than Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker famously worked as a video store clerk before selling his scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers and, eventually, changing the game completely with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. So it should come as no surprise, then, that Tarantino still has a soft spot for VHS and is not exactly down with the Netflix era.

In an excerpt from Tom Roston’s new book I Lost it at The Video Store: A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era (via The Playlist), Tarantino and a number of other influential directors weigh in on how the moviewatching experience has shifted significantly since the VHS heyday, with Tarantino revealing that he’s still clinging to video tape:


“I am not excited about streaming at all. I like something hard and tangible in my hand. And I can't watch a movie on a laptop. I don't use Netflix at all. I don't have any sort of delivery system. I have the videos from Video Archives. They went out of business, and I bought their inventory. Probably close to eight thousand tapes and DVDs… I have a bunch of DVDs and a bunch of videos, and I still tape movies off of television on video so I can keep my collection going.”

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Image via Dimension Films

Again, not a huge surprise here, and David O. Russell, it appears, is not a huge Netflix fan either:

“There's a lot of stuff going on with the licensing and the deals where they no longer have certain movies. It used to be that Amazon had everything, but Amazon changed their deal. And I'll say it to the guy I know who owns Netflix: it's a bunch of dreck.”

He’s not wrong. The licensing for folks like Netflix and Amazon has gotten more complex as video stores have gone out of business, and the result has been a bit of a “thinning of the herd” in terms of library volume. Netflix’s interface is specifically designed so that you don’t notice how few quality movies they actually have available to stream.

Darren Aronofsky echoes this sentiment, though he’s optimistic about the future of streaming:

“I'm a newcomer to Netflix. I can't wait for a seminal, 'Kim's Streaming' type of experience where you can get any title you want. There seems like someone should get on it. There are so many good films. And there are too many that are hard to get. Netflix is limited that way. I like their original programming, but I can't say I use it for much else. Although, I did hear about a Gael García Bernal film, Even the Rain (2010). It's a film he made in Bolivia. It's fantastic—and you can watch it on Netflix. The experience was very similar to how I would stumble on a film on videotape. It's a small, beautiful foreign film. And I streamed it.”

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Image via Paramount Pictures

And when it comes to how new viewing habits how the filmmakers craft their films, Aronofsky admits he was thinking about someone watching Noah on an iPhone during post-production:

Darren Aronofsky: Most people are going to watch my films on an iPhone. We talk about that. When we did a sound mix, we did an iPad or iPhone mix for Noah, so that hopefully it would be in stereo. "Look," I said, "there's a real audience there, and you have to be conscious of that. You can't control it."

Quentin Tarantino: That's the most depressing thing I've ever heard in my life.

Aronofsky went on to say that it actually influenced his decision to return to 1.85 framing, because that’s how most people will end up seeing his movies. Tarantino, meanwhile, hopes to bring folks back to the cinemas as he rolls out The Hateful Eight in glorious 70mm this fall. The only problem there is that so few theaters are able to actually project 70mm film anymore, meaning most viewers will have to wait and see the film digitally projected.

I admire the steadfastness of filmmakers like Tarantino and Christopher Nolan who are trying to keep film projection alive, but the sad reality is theater chains just aren’t willing/able to revert back to film projection. Digital is the reality now, whether you like it or not, and filmmakers like David Fincher are doing incredible things with the format. That being said, I'm still thankful folks like Tarantino exist, fighting the good fight to the bitter end.

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Image via The Weinstein Company