Quentin Tarantino’s admiration for Pedro Almodóvar is documented in statements made years apart. Matador holds a visible place in that affinity, while Bad Education was his standout choice in San Sebastián in 2009.
Two statements that do not form a single ranking
On September 18, 2009, EFE reported from the San Sebastián Festival on Tarantino’s praise of Almodóvar. The American placed him among the great filmmakers of the previous two decades and chose Bad Education as his best film. The statement refers to a filmography that still did not include later works such as Julieta or Pain and Glory; it should not be read as a judgment that had already taken them into account.
In April 2023, in an interview with Jacinto Antón in El País, Tarantino explained his enthusiasm for Matador. He emphasized that he greatly appreciated the film, without claiming it was Almodóvar’s best, and linked its impact to an expressive freedom he felt was lacking in Hollywood during the 1980s. The comment describes a viewer’s encounter with a specific work.
Taken together, the two statements make it possible to speak of sustained admiration. They do not authorize inventing a complete list of preferences or attributing the same intensity of enthusiasm to each of the Spanish director’s feature films. They also avoid a false contradiction: calling one film a favorite on one occasion does not prevent recognizing, on another, the particular achievements of a different work.
What Matador offers that cinephile gaze
Matador, from 1986, crosses the bullfighting world with desire and death. Its willingness to bring images of violence and sexual excitement close together can be unsettling because it does not give the viewer a stable distance from which to watch. Tarantino’s comment on its audacity makes sense in that territory, where the provocation comes from how the elements are combined and from the place given to the audience in relation to them.
The film also shifts the tone with which extreme situations are presented. A character may experience something as tragedy while the surrounding world introduces something grotesque or comic. That coexistence makes it hard to settle on a single emotional response. As an analysis of the film, it helps explain why it would be reductive to describe it only as a thriller or only as a black comedy.
The gaze plays a decisive role in that combination. Characters may look at a body, an image, or a gesture as if it contained a promise that another person does not perceive. Desire changes what they consider meaningful. The staging allows the viewer to recognize that intensity without having to share it, and the distance between those two positions feeds part of Matador’s discomfort.
The interest of comparing it with Tarantino lies in that tonal freedom. Both cinemas can make the viewer move from laughter to an uncomfortable feeling without formally announcing the shift. It is an affinity that can be studied in the films; it does not prove that every solution in the American director’s work comes from Almodóvar, nor that Matador by itself explains his style.
There are also differences worth preserving. Almodóvar’s world organizes desire, identity, family relationships, and representation through its own concerns. Reducing it to a collection of extreme images useful to another director shifts the center of his films. His work does not need to become a precursor to Pulp Fiction to be interesting in this conversation.
Bad Education and the construction of a story
The 2004 film adds another dimension to the affinity: the difficulty of separating a memory, a text, and the version someone wants to impose on their past. The characters do not give the viewer the same information at the same time. A story can work as a confession, as an instrument of seduction, or as a means of getting something from the other person.
That functioning means the narrative has consequences within the action itself. Telling a story is not the same as stopping the film to explain background; it changes relationships between characters and forces a reassessment of what was thought to be known. This is an observation about its structure, not a reproduction of a detailed plot that Tarantino would have given in the brief 2009 statement.
The presence of cinema within the story adds another layer: representing something makes it possible to change names, assign roles, and decide what will remain visible. Reconstruction can preserve an experience and distort it at the same time. That ambivalence sets the narrative interest of Bad Education apart from a simple collection of surprises; each version has an effect on those trying to control their past or benefit from it.
Admiration between filmmakers becomes more interesting when it preserves those differences in scale. A news item records a preference; an interview lets us specify a reason; analysis of the films can explore additional connections, as long as it is presented as critical reading. Mixing those levels would attribute to the filmmaker comments that belong to the person writing about him.
Almodóvar thus appears as a cinematic interlocutor whose work Tarantino has publicly valued, with examples and dates that can be identified. Matador allows us to talk about audacity and a mix of tones; Bad Education, about a choice expressed at a festival. Neither reference requires building a supposed definitive hierarchy or a story of private friendship that those statements do not document.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.