Tarantino's preferences among his contemporaries change in scale depending on the conversation: a decade list, a selection for the century, or a film he keeps returning to. Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, and Richard Linklater offer documented examples of that admiration.
Paul Thomas Anderson: admiration that does not equal total approval
In December 2025, during his conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about 21st-century cinema, Tarantino placed There Will Be Blood in fifth place. Coverage from People and other outlets also noted his objections to Paul Dano's performance. The combination shows that a high spot in a list can coexist with reservations expressed bluntly.
Those objections are Tarantino's opinions, not facts that determine the actor's quality. To understand his relationship with Anderson, it is enough to keep both dimensions: he valued the film highly and discussed part of it. Reducing the conversation to the insult would erase the recognition; omitting the reservation would turn the praise into something more uniform than it was.
There Will Be Blood, released in 2007, stages a power struggle around Daniel Plainview. Labor, wealth, family, and religion become fields of negotiation. Conversations can function as confrontations in which each man tries to define the terms under which the other will have to respond.
As a critical reading, that verbal energy offers a point of interest for anyone familiar with Tarantino's cinema. Anderson, however, gives landscapes, bodies, and silences a weight that cannot be reduced to a competition of dialogue. The affinity makes it possible to compare methods without turning both directors into variants of the same formula.
David Fincher: The Social Network and a choice rooted in its time
On May 27, 2020, Première reported that Tarantino had chosen The Social Network as the best film of the 2010s. The statement came from an interview he gave the magazine. Its frame was a specific decade; it should not be turned into a declaration about all cinema in history.
Fincher's film, written by Aaron Sorkin, turns the creation of Facebook into a story of ambition, conflict, and competing versions. The legal proceedings allow the audience to revisit events that different characters interpret in incompatible ways. The viewer does not get a neutral biography, but a dramatic construction that organizes those perspectives.
The pace of the dialogue contributes to the sense of competition. Speaking quickly can be a way to gain the upper hand, hide a wound, or prevent the other person from reframing the issue. The staging and editing make the movement of words carry emotional consequences as well as information.
In the 21st-century selection discussed with Ellis in December 2025, Tarantino placed Zodiac in sixth place, according to coverage from the San Francisco Chronicle. This is another set of films and another set of selection conditions. There is no need to present the difference as an automatic retraction of what was said in 2020.
Zodiac proposes a different relationship with information: investigation can consume time without producing certainty proportional to the effort. The comparison with The Social Network makes it possible to appreciate Fincher's range within a documented affinity. One film speeds up power exchanges; the other can make you feel the length of a search that resists closure.
Richard Linklater and the pleasure of staying with the characters
Dazed and Confused appeared in Tarantino's selection published by L.A. Weekly in August 2009. The choice corresponds to his survey of films released since 1992. It is enough to document enthusiasm for Linklater without assigning him an all-time ranking for the director's career.
The 1993 film follows several young people through the end of a school day and the night that follows. Its structure makes it possible to move between groups and small situations. The lack of a single dominant goal leaves the focus on coexistence, social hierarchies, and the way each person tries to find a place.
The music, the cars, and the gathering places help build a shared sense of time. The viewer can enjoy a conversation even if it does not immediately lead to a major turn. The film offers the pleasure of recognizing behavior and watching how it changes when someone enters or leaves a group.
The shift from day to night also changes expectations: some school hierarchies persist and others become negotiable. The apparent freedom of leaving class does not immediately erase the pressures young people exert on one another.
That register broadens the map of affinities. Anderson, Fincher, and Linklater do not appear here as rivals to whom Tarantino assigned a permanent personal ranking. Their films produce different experiences: confrontation, investigation, verbal speed, or coexistence. Praise for one of them does not need to imply a hierarchical comparison among the three directors.
The dates help keep that diversity alive. A 2009 recommendation and a 2025 selection can coexist as moments in a longer cinephile conversation. Returning to the specific films is more revealing than turning a director's opinions into a fixed scoreboard of wins and losses among his contemporaries.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.