Tarantino's preferences among his contemporaries change in scale depending on the conversation: a decade list, a century selection, or a film he returns to. Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher and Richard Linklater provide documented examples of that admiration.
Paul Thomas Anderson: admiration that does not amount to 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 media also reported his objections to Paul Dano's performance. The combination shows that a high place in a selection can sit alongside reservations expressed in no uncertain terms.
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 in view: 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, organises a power struggle around Daniel Plainview. Work, wealth, family and religion become territories for negotiation. Conversations can work as confrontations in which each man tries to define the terms under which the other will have to respond.
As critical reading, that verbal energy offers a point of interest for anyone familiar with Tarantino's cinema. However, Anderson 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 the two directors into variants of the same formula.
David Fincher: The Social Network and a choice situated in time
On 27 May 2020, Première published that Tarantino had chosen The Social Network as the best film of the 2010s. The claim came from an interview he gave the magazine. Its frame was a specific decade; it should not be turned into a statement 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. Legal proceedings make it possible to revisit facts that different characters interpret in incompatible ways. The audience does not receive a neutral biography, but a dramatic construction that organises those perspectives.
The pace of the dialogue contributes to the sense of competition. Talking quickly can be a way of gaining the upper hand, hiding a wound or preventing the interlocutor from reframing the issue. The direction and editing make the circulation of words carry emotional consequences as well as convey information.
In the 21st-century selection discussed with Ellis in December 2025, Tarantino placed Zodiac in sixth place, according to coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. This is another set of films and different 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: investigating can take up time without producing certainty proportionate 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 duration of a search that refuses to close.
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 run-through of films released since 1992. It is enough to document enthusiasm for Linklater without attributing to him a ranking across the director's entire career.
The 1993 film follows several young people through the end of a school day and the night that follows. Its structure allows movement between groups and small situations. The lack of a single dominant goal leaves the focus on sociability, social hierarchies and the way each person tries to find a place.
The music, cars and gathering places help build an experience of shared time. The viewer can enjoy a conversation even if it does not immediately lead to a major twist. The film offers the pleasure of recognising behaviour and seeing 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 open to negotiation. The apparent freedom of leaving class does not immediately remove 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 has assigned a permanent personal ranking. Their films produce different experiences: confrontation, investigation, verbal speed or shared life. Praise for one of them does not need to imply a hierarchical comparison between the three filmmakers.
The dates help keep that diversity alive. A recommendation from 2009 and a selection from 2025 can coexist as moments in an extended cinephile conversation. Returning to the specific films is more illuminating 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.