Milius occupies a singular place in Tarantino’s cinephilia: his characters can sound like legends before they learn how to live as people.
A preference that allows for differences
Quentin Tarantino has defended John Milius without reducing his filmography to a collection of armed men. In a New Beverly review cited by Rotten Tomatoes on June 22, 2020, he placed his personal preference inDillinger, although he recognized inBig Wednesdaythe film that could be considered its director’s classic. The distinction is revealing: a favorite work and a representative work do not have to coincide. Nor does it amount to a closed ranking of all his screenplays.
Dillinger, released in 1973, andBig Wednesday, from 1978, seem to belong to separate worlds. One organizes its story around pursued criminals; the other follows a group of surfers through the transition from youth to adulthood. Yet both make it possible to think about the relationship between a group and the image it wants to leave of itself. Adventure becomes a way of manufacturing a legend, and the legend can prove more lasting than the people who sustain it.
That overlap helps explain the interest of a viewer like Tarantino. Milius’s characters rarely settle for filling a practical function. They talk, compete, and show off as if someone were going to tell their story afterward. The gesture has a ceremonial value. A showdown, a farewell, or a man’s entrance into a room can weigh as much for its effect on others as for what it changes in the action.
Big Wednesday and the epic of losing youth
Big Wednesday follows Matt, Jack, and Leroy, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey. Their friendship unfolds around surfing, but the sea does not exhaust the film’s subject. Bodies that age, responsibilities that appear, and separations that prevent a way of life from remaining intact also matter. The beach offers a point of return; it cannot take the protagonists exactly back to the moment they came from.
The structure makes time felt in the differences between reunions. The jokes and physical energy take on another meaning when they return after an absence. The viewer comes to know the friends as a group and learns to see them as individuals with different destinies. That tension keeps nostalgia from becoming just a string of pleasant images. To remember something also means recognizing that it can no longer be repeated in the same way.
The surfing sequences provide a scale that transforms intimate conflicts into spectacular images. Against the waves, a person seems small without ceasing to be the center of our attention. The challenge is to maintain balance in the face of a force that cannot be fully mastered. As a reading of the film, that relationship neatly expresses the distance between the confidence of youth and the later experience of its limits. There is no need to turn every wave into an allegory in order to perceive it.
The reunion thus carries a different emotion from conventional sports victory. The question is not only who executes a maneuver better. What matters is that the characters once again share a space whose meaning has changed. The celebration contains a farewell, and the farewell makes it possible to recognize the value of what has been lived. It is an epic of companions that lasts precisely because it cannot prolong youth forever.
The screenwriter behind the monumental voice
To appreciate Milius, it helps to distinguish his work as a director from his contributions to other people’s films. Among his writing credits areApocalypse Now andBig Wednesday; the latter was written with Dennis Aaberg. Recognizing those collaborations keeps us from attributing every decision in a collective work to him alone. It also makes it possible to see what a screenwriter can contribute before performance, editing, and staging alter the effect of his words.
In his stories, dialogue often establishes a relationship with codes of conduct. The characters talk about courage, loyalty, or belonging, but then they must act under conditions that make those ideas hard to honor. The dramatic force emerges in the distance between speech and behavior. A grand declaration can be sincere, ridiculous, or both; what matters is how the scene tests the person who says it.
That is why it is not enough to describe his writing as an accumulation of forceful lines. A line needs a situation to give it weight. The wait for a showdown, a companion’s glance, or the awareness of defeat can turn a few words into a promise that is hard to keep. Milius’s monumentality works best when it keeps that fragility beneath the surface.
Tarantino’s assessment invites a reconsideration of that breadth: the filmmaker ofDillingeris also capable of building a story around friendship and loss. To place other discussions of writers, versions, and 1970s films in context, Cinema Speculation provides the framework of his critical work. The journey through Milius becomes richer when specific works are compared, without turning admiration into automatic approval of every character, speech, or decision in his career.
Check out the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.