While at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival to promote a special screening of Rolling Thunder (1977) and present the Grand Prix award, Deadline caught up with renowned director Quentin Tarantino who reflected on his journey at Cannes throughout the years.
In 1994, Tarantino won the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction, significantly elevating his career and status as a serious filmmaker. Reservoir Dogs (1992) competed at Cannes two years earlier but lost to Ingmar Bergman’s The Best Intentions.
Due to concerns about graphic violence, Tarantino alleges that Cannes placed a content warning on both films, which was unprecedented then.
They invented something for our screening that they’d never done before, they put an orange sticker in the ticket that said: ‘This movie may be too violent for you to watch.’ And they’d never done that before and they ended up putting the same sticker on ‘Pulp Fiction’ when it played here in 1994.
The director also claimed that the Cannes committee removed the content warning after the emergence of other graphic films by European filmmakers like Lars von Trier, known for his sexually explicit and violent films such as Nymphomanic, The House That Jack Built, and Antichrist.
Regarding his tenth and final upcoming film, The Movie Critic, which is loosely based on a real-life 1970s porn critic, it is unclear whether the film will receive a content warning at future film festivals due to graphic material.
The Movie Critic is currently in pre-production and begins filming in the fall of 2023.
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