Quentin Tarantino is well-known for his stylised, ultra-violent movies, such as Kill Bill, which is being re-released as an uncut single film in cinemas next month.
When promoting the movie on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, the filmmaker ranked the 20 best films of the 21st century without repeating a director.
At No 15 was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a very serious and extremely violent adaptation of Jesus’ trial, torture and execution.
Praising Gibson’s ability to immersive the viewer in the ancient world, Tarantino said: “I love the fact that he never really chose one tone and carried it through. There are scenes where you feel like you’re watching the most realistic Biblical movie you’ve ever seen. Then all of a sudden it turns into a religious painting and gets completely avant-garde, and gets surreal. And then there’s actually horror movie imagery that he invests in, big time. And then there’s political s*** in there. You really see the political situation of a Pontius Pilate in a really terrific way. And all those actors just seem amazing because they’re not speaking English, and it just seems so convincing.”
Yet it was the film’s extreme bloody violence suffered by Jim Caviezel’s Jesus that shockingly made Tarantino laugh and discover a dark side deep within.
Tarantino confessed: “I was laughing a lot during the movie. Not because we were trying to be perverse, laughing at Jesus getting f***ed up — extreme violence is just funny to me — and when you go so far beyond extremity, it just gets funnier and funnier. We were just groaning and laughing at how f***ed up this was […] It just ended up being an extremely enjoyable experience. But now that sounds like I’m just being perverse, but no, I actually, I thought he kind of did a tremendous directorial job… He put me in that time period.”
But it was the scene where Jesus is whipped by the Roman soldiers, which Tarantino said brought out his own sadomasochism that he didn’t know was inside him.
The filmmaker continued: “You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is gonna be f***ing terrible.’ And he’s stretching it out, stretching — and then it starts happening. And then it’s like wham. And you feel it. And then it’s another one, wham. And like, three, four, five times, and you feel every f***ing blow.”
Tarantino then confessed: “By the sixth blow, I traded places. And I was now a Roman. And I started getting kind of turned on by the beating. But I’m not Jesus getting beat. … I became the Roman, and all of a sudden the whipping — I started getting the rush of that. And I couldn’t believe I was feeling that. But I was feeling it. I liked that it reached into a sadomasochistic aspect in me that I didn’t quite know I had, and it kind of turned me on. … I didn’t know I was going to switch horses. I just did.”
He added: “I talked to Mel Gibson about this and he looked at me like I was a f***ing nut. Of course he doesn’t understand where I’m coming from on this, and I don’t know if anyone else will.”
