Quentin Tarantino’s admiration for Pedro Almodóvar is documented in statements made years apart. Matador occupies a visible place in that affinity, while Bad Education was his standout choice in San Sebastian in 2009.
Two statements that do not form a single ranking
On 18 September 2009, EFE reported from the San Sebastian Film 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 an assessment that had already taken them into account.
In April 2023, interviewed by Jacinto Antón in El País, Tarantino explained his enthusiasm for Matador. He stressed that he greatly admired 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, both statements allow us to speak of a sustained admiration. They do not authorise us to invent a complete list of preferences or to attribute the same intensity of enthusiasm to every one of the Spaniard’s feature films. They also avoid a false contradiction: calling one film a favourite on one occasion does not prevent someone from valuing the particular achievements of a different work on another.
What does Matador offer to that cinephile’s gaze?
Matador, from 1986, crosses the bullfighting world with desire and death. Its willingness to bring together images of violence and sexual excitement can be unsettling because it does not offer the viewer a stable distance from which to look. Tarantino’s comment on its audacity makes sense in that territory, where provocation arises 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 it presents extreme situations. A character may experience something as a 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 occupies a decisive place in that combination. Characters may observe a body, an image or a gesture as if it contained a promise that someone else does not perceive. Desire alters what they consider significant. The staging allows the viewer to recognise that intensity without having to share it, and the distance between those two positions feeds part of Matador’s unease.
The interest of comparing it with Tarantino lies in that tonal freedom. Both bodies of work can make the viewer move from laughter to discomfort without formally announcing the shift. This 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 alone explains his style.
There are also differences worth preserving. Almodóvar’s world organises desire, identity, family relationships and representation through its own concerns. Reducing it to a collection of extreme images that another director can use would shift the centre of his films. His work does not need to become a precursor to Pulp Fiction in order to be of interest 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 function as a confession, as a tool of seduction or as a means of getting something from the person being spoken to.
That function means the narrative has consequences within the action itself. Telling a story is not the same as pausing the film to explain background; it changes relationships between characters and forces a reappraisal of what was thought to be known. This is an observation about its structure, not the reproduction of a detailed plot that Tarantino may have given in his 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 distinguishes the narrative interest of Bad Education from a mere collection of surprises; each version has an effect on those trying to control their past or profit from it.
Admiration between auteurs is more interesting when it preserves those differences in scale. A news item records a preference; an interview allows a motive to be specified; analysis of the films can explore further connections, provided 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 praised, with examples and dates that can be identified. Matador allows us to speak of audacity and tonal mixture; Bad Education, of a choice expressed at a festival. Neither reference requires building a supposed definitive hierarchy or a story of private friendship that these statements do not document.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.