Quentin Tarantino Names His Favorite Director, With a Catch

Quentin Tarantino has never been shy about handing out praise, whether it’s for a forgotten kung fu movie or a 1930s swashbuckler. What’s rarer is hearing him rank a living filmmaker next to himself. That’s exactly why his latest talk show appearance has movie fans buzzing.

Tarantino returned to ‘The Graham Norton Show’ this week for his first appearance in more than a decade. He sat on the BBC sofa alongside Colin Farrell, Ellen DeGeneres and Gemma Chan, and covered everything from his upcoming stage comedy ‘The Popinjay Cavalier’ to his Los Angeles theaters, the New Beverly and the Vista. He also revealed that the script for his tenth and final film is finished.

But the moment that has fans talking came while he was promoting ‘The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth’, the film he wrote. Asked about the director, Tarantino named David Fincher as his favorite filmmaker, with a typical Tarantino caveat that he’s the only exception. It’s a perfectly in-character compliment, and it lands harder because of how the project came together.

Fincher wasn’t Tarantino’s first idea. According the interview, Tarantino was going to shelve the script until Brad Pitt suggested bringing in Fincher. Pitt has said he’s the one who convinced Tarantino to show Fincher the scripts.

Tarantino liked the idea, and once Fincher read the screenplay and expressed interest, the two met and hit it off. In Tarantino’s telling, the pairing turned out to be a marriage made in heaven.

This isn’t the first time Tarantino has put Fincher on a pedestal. On ‘The Church of Tarantino’ podcast in 2025, he said the two of them are the best directors working, and that Fincher choosing to adapt his work showed a level of seriousness he felt deserved recognition. He also explained that he passed on directing the sequel himself because it unenthused him, as he didn’t want his final film to be a sequel.

Tarantino has also called ‘The Social Network’ the best movie of the 2010s and has praised ‘Zodiac’ as a masterpiece. Last year, he gushed over Fincher’s ‘The Killer’, calling it a masterpiece and one of the best things he’d seen this decade.

‘The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth’ is set in 1977, eight years after the events of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, with Cliff working as a fixer in the shadows of the Hollywood studio system. Pitt reprises his Oscar-winning role, and the cast includes Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Peter Weller. Pitt also produces alongside Ceán Chaffin.

The film began shooting in July 2025 and wrapped principal photography in January 2026. It opens with an exclusive two-week IMAX run starting November 25, before debuting on Netflix on December 23.

Tarantino isn’t done with Cliff Booth. His novel ‘The Adventures of Cliff Booth’ arrives on December 8, which means he’s tackling the character on screen and on the page at the same time. He has also said the stage will get his attention before the camera does, as he plans to finish the play first.

As for the tenth film, he said he wants to go home to his family and live a little before deciding what to do with the script. He even joked about his long-standing ten-film rule, treating it as a convenient loophole. For fans, that means more Tarantino stories are on the way, even if the director’s chair isn’t the first stop.

The praise lands against an interesting backdrop. Page Six reported earlier this month that Fincher chose to leave his Netflix deal after clashing with film chief Dan Lin over the budget for ‘Cliff Booth’. Lin has since been fired, according to reports, which adds another layer to the story of a film that nearly didn’t happen.

Even so, ‘Cliff Booth’ has the rare distinction of being a Tarantino script directed by a filmmaker he considers a peer. Few directors are trusted with that, and none have been publicly crowned quite like this.