Quentin Tarantino has revealed the one film trilogy that - for him - really hits all the marks, and it might not be one that you expect.
Sure, there are some great trilogies out there, but Tarantino has higher standards than most when it comes to the cinema.
In this interview, he revealed the three films that he thinks ‘completely and utterly work’ together as a full piece.
Quentin Tarantino is known as a scholar of film
Tarantino has enjoyed a long and successful career behind the camera, directing classics like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and The Wolf of Wall Street.
So, it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about movies.
What’s more, he’s directed Kill Bill volumes one and two, so he knows how to try to follow one movie on from another.
However, he has never attempted a trilogy - perhaps because they are famously difficult to get right.
For every Star Wars original trilogy, there is a Star Wars second trilogy, if you catch the drift.
Making one great film is difficult enough, let alone three on the spin.
Luckily, Tarantino believes the feat has been achieved once, at least.
In an interview with Bill Maher, Tarantino offered his opinion.
He explained: “I think there’s only one trilogy that completely and utterly works to the Nth degree, and that’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.
Tarantino continued: “It does what no other trilogy has ever been quite able to do,
“The first movie is terrific, but the second movie is so great and takes the whole idea to such a bigger canvas that it obliterates the first one.
“And then the third one 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.”
The ‘Dollars’ trilogy is a Western series like no other
In the trilogy, Clint Eastwood plays the ‘Man with No Name’ who is a transitory bandit-killer travelling the Old West, sorting out the bad guys and collecting the bounty.
Interestingly, it wasn’t supposed to be a trilogy at all.
Legendary filmmaker Sergio Leone specialized in Westerns, and his first film was such a great success that the studios wanted more.
Tarantino clearly learned a lot from Leone’s style, as he has played with the non-linear timelines that feature in the ‘Dollars’ trilogy, among other popular tropes.
In a more obvious nod, he also had Ennio Morricone - the creator of the Dollars trilogy’s legendary scores - contribute to his own film The Hateful Eight.
When Tarantino loves your films, you know you’ve made it, and when you hear his opinion as a non-filmmaker, you should probably take that opinion on board.