Picking their brains for years and they couldn’t find any 
similarities between the fairy tale worlds of Peter Jackson’s 
imagination and the quirky zigzagging of Quentin Tarantino’s 
films. While there are so many opposites in the two filmmakers’ 
aesthetic tastes, there isn’t much distance between the two 
either. First off, they both like to end their films in a great 
bloodbath where good and evil battle it out and many die from 
each side. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy ended with 
one of the most stretched out and bloody battle scenes in the 
history of cinema – and not to mention his previous work in 
braindead. Tarantino ended Reservoir Dogs in bloodbath and a 
recent Jimmy Kimmel show that he directed where the audience 
pulled out guns and bullets flew leaving no survivors.

Peter Jackson began monopolizing the world of the fantastic when 
he made the Frighteners with Michael J. Fox and now King Kong 
with Naomi Watts. Tarantino focused on the Japanese trademarks 
including the sword fighting sequences that he insisted be 
Japanese choreographed.

Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino are two of those few 
directors that come through their filmmaking. "You can sit and 
watch a movie and know right away that Tarantino is behind it. He 
breathes that great of a vision through the camera that it 
completely tarantinizes the picture." 

Of course, there are a few other directors in Hollywood 
like P.T. Anderson who made Boogey Nights and Magnolia and 
Shervin Youssefian with Machiavelli Hangman who bring 
that sense of authorship to audiences. M. Night Shyamalan left 
moviegoers begging for more when he unveiled the stunning 
conclusion of the Sixth Sense.

Interestingly, however, Shyamalan slowly became a prisoner of 
what had made him famous: the twist ending. Unbreakable and the 
Village were redundant clones of the Sixth Sense, but 
unfortunately, they were shown to audiences who went in already 
expecting a twist ending. They looked for all the clues and signs 
and most of them figured out the ending before the middle of the 
film, which was a real disappointment.

Then, there are the writers-turned-filmmakers including Paul 
Haggis (Crash) and Brian Helgeland (Knight’s Tale, Man on Fire) 
who bring with them a certain strength for their characters, an 
anchorship that really fuels the humanity of the story. While 
films like Machiavelli Hangman and Pulp Fiction concentrate on 
dialogue and ingenious film structure, these writers’ pieces 
seem to only focus on the human condition.

The point of this is: we are coming into a day and age of 
Hollywood cinema where there is not only enough material to wet 
our mouths but strong and meaningful enough material to quench 
our thirsts. 

Rudiger Kohoutova has a law degree and is 
a fulltime writer at various publications 
in Los Angeles. Machiavelli Hangman: 
http://www.hangmanmovie.com