Milius occupies a singular place in Tarantino's cinephilia: his characters can speak like legends before they learn to live as people.
A preference that admits differences
Quentin Tarantino has championed John Milius without reducing his filmography to a collection of armed men. In a New Beverly review picked up by Rotten Tomatoes on 22 June 2020, he placed his personal preference inDillinger, although he recognised inBig Wednesday the film that could be considered his director's classic. The distinction is revealing: a favourite 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 organises its story around pursued criminals; the other watches surfers through the passage 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 making a legend, and the legend can prove more enduring than the people who sustain it.
That crossover helps explain the interest of a viewer such as Tarantino. Milius's characters rarely settle for fulfilling a practical function. They talk, compete and display themselves as if someone were going to tell their story afterwards. The gesture has a ceremonial value. A confrontation, a farewell or a man's entrance into a room can matter 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 develops around surfing, but the sea does not exhaust the film's subject. The ageing bodies, the responsibilities that arise and the separations that prevent a way of life from being kept intact are just as important. The beach offers a point to return to; it cannot take the protagonists back exactly to the moment they set out from.
The structure allows time to be felt in the differences between reunions. The jokes and the 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 prevents nostalgia from being merely a succession of pleasant snapshots. To remember something also means recognising that it can no longer be repeated in the same way.
The surfing sequences lend a scale that turns intimate conflicts into spectacular images. Against the swell, a person seems small without ceasing to be the focus of our attention. The difficulty lies in maintaining balance in the face of a force that cannot be fully controlled. As a reading of the film, that relationship expresses well 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 sporting victory. The question is not only who performs a manoeuvre best. What matters is that the characters once again share a space whose meaning has changed. The celebration contains a farewell, and the farewell allows the value of what has been lived to be recognised. It is an epic of companions that lasts precisely because it cannot prolong youth for ever.
The screenwriter behind the monumental voice
To assess Milius, it is worth distinguishing his work as a director from his contributions to other people's films. His writing credits includeApocalypse Now andBig Wednesday; the latter was written with Dennis Aaberg. Recognising those collaborations prevents every decision in a collective work from being attributed to him alone. It also makes it possible to observe what a screenwriter can contribute before performance, editing and mise-en-scène alter the effect of his words.
In his stories, dialogue often establishes a relationship with codes of conduct. The characters speak of courage, loyalty or belonging, but then have to act under conditions that make those ideas hard to uphold. The dramatic force emerges in the distance between speech and behaviour. A grand statement may be sincere, ridiculous or both; what matters is how the scene tests the person who utters it.
That is why it is insufficient to describe his writing as a succession of forceful lines. A line needs a situation to give it weight. The anticipation of a confrontation, 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 retains that fragility beneath the surface.
Tarantino's assessment invites us to revisit that breadth: the maker ofDillingeris also capable of shaping a story around friendship and loss. To place other discussions about writers, versions and films of the 1970s, Cinema Speculationprovides the context for his critical activity. The journey through Milius gains something when concrete works are compared, without turning admiration into automatic approval of every character, speech or decision in his career.
See the selection offilmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.