Quentin Tarantino Became Obsessed With This 6-Season TV Masterpiece — And It Secretly Changed One of His Biggest Casting Decisions
Quentin Tarantino has never been afraid to make his opinions known, and that can be a good thing, like when he’s acknowledging a six-season Western TV show and even helping revive its spin-off. Tarantino’s influences are wide-ranging, obscure, and often archaic, but let it never be said that he doesn’t keep up with the zeitgeist.
Tarantino is a fascinating director, both behind the camera and in front of it. In interviews, he’s espoused his appreciation for an assortment of titles you might not expect the auteur to have strong feelings about based on the content of his filmography. He likes war films like Black Hawk Down, Toy Story 3 is one of his favorite movies of the past quarter-century, and he has an affinity for the action thriller Unstoppable (via People).
He’s a man with eclectic tastes, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take an interest in the titles that his films have clearly influenced and the genres in which he frequently plays. It might not come as that big of a surprise to hear then that Tarantino is a fan of Justified, joining most of the TV-watching world in appreciation for the six-season neo-Western.
When asked what shows he’d been watching back in 2015, Tarantino said, “The last two shows that I watched all the way were Justified and How I Met Your Mother,” (via VanityFair). I’m going to let Tarantino’s appreciation for How I Met Your Mother lie for now, but his nod to Justified fits with the stories he’s chosen to tell on film.
Justified may have even convinced Tarantino to cast Walton Goggins in The Hateful Eight. Tarantino says that Goggins part in The Shield is what initially inspired him to cast Goggins in Django Unchained, but Boyd Crowder’s actor earned a much bigger part in Tarantino’s later film.
According to Tarantino, Goggins’ work on Justified was almost like a trial reel for a bigger part, “You know, literally watching him for six years do faux-Quentin dialogue let me know that he’s got the right kind of tongue.” It seems Justified has a place in Tarantino’s video store-like brain, with a spot in the middle of the shelf.
Why Justified Is Quentin Tarantino’s Favorite TV Western
Justified seems to be one of Tarantino’s winning Western TV shows, judging both from his comments about it, and maybe more importantly, the comments wen don’t hear about it, because Tarantino is not afraid to take a show to task if he finds something disagreeable about it.
Yellowstone, for instance, is one of those shows that confirms his belief in the superiority of film over television (via Variety). To Tarantino, “…a lot of the TV now has the patina of a good movie. There are using cinematic language to get you caught up in it.” Yellowstone, he claims, is compelling and easy to get caught up in, but is a soap opera at the end of the day, “You don’t remember it five years from now.”
How Quentin Tarantino Helped Bring Justified Back For A Revival Series
While we don’t know if Justified convinced Tarantino to cast Timothy Olyphant in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, his performance as Raylan Givens surely didn’t hurt. It was on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that Olyphant and Tarantino got to talking about the show and discussing Justified: City Primeval, a 1980 novel from Elmore Leonard.
According to Michael Dinner, an EP for Justified, Olyphant called him up after the series and said that he and Tarantino thought a show based on City Primeval would make for a great installment in the franchise. While Tarantino didn’t end up having an official hand in the sequel series, Justified might not be the long-running franchise it is now without his input.
