Quentin Tarantino Only Loves 1 Thing About The Beatles and It’s a Movie

Quentin Tarantino isn’t the biggest fan of The Beatles’ music, but he loves one of their movies. The film in question is very different from his own. Here’s a look at one of Tarantino’s most surprising opinions.

Quentin Tarantino fell in love with a Beatles movie in the 1990s

In Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman’s character said that there are two types of people in the world Elvis people and Beatles people. She opines that Elvis people can like The Beatles and Beatles people can like Elvis but nobody can like both equally. She intuits that John Travolta’s character is an Elvis man.

One might assume this dialog is just an interesting bit of character-building rather than a heartfelt observation. However, Tarantino believes what he wrote. During a 2021 interview with W, Tarantino named his favorite Hollywood movies from the late 1960s.

“Head, starring The Monkees — the script is co-written by Jack Nicholson!” he replied. “And Yellow Submarine. I’m not a big Beatles fan; you’re either an Elvis man or a Beatles man, and I’m an Elvis man. But sometime in 1999, my then-girlfriend and I watched Yellow Submarine, and we loved it. After seeing Yellow Submarine, there finally was one thing about The Beatles that I had tremendous affection for.” Tarantino’s comments are interesting since two other Fan Four movies — A Hard Day’s Night and Help!  — have been critically acclaimed for around six decades.

The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ is no ‘Pulp Fiction’

Tarantino’s love of Yellow Submarine might be a little surprising. When people think of his movies, they often think of their supreme violence. Kill Bill and Django Unchained don’t have much in common with Yellow Submarine. The Beatles’ most beloved film is a hippy fever dream where conflict is solved with kindness rather than with knives and guns.

However, Tarantino is nothing if not an innovator. Yellow Submarine, with its Peter Max aesthetic, was something new on cinema screens. Perhaps he loves Yellow Submarine because, like Head, it was and is radically different from the aesthetics of the vast majority of Hollywood movies. Or maybe he just likes the sound of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

What Quentin Tarantino thought of Elvis Presley

In his 2022 interview with Cinema Speculation, the Reservoir Dogs director revealed discussions with his friend Floyd influenced his taste in music. “I was all ears about this firsthand rock ‘n’ roll history, because I wasn’t into ’70s white-boy rock,” he said. “I didn’t give a f*** about Kiss, I didn’t give a f*** about Aerosmith, I didn’t give a f*** about Alice Cooper or Black Sabbath or Jethro Tull.”

“At 16, I think I heard of Bruce Springsteen, but I’d never heard Bruce Springsteen,” he added. “I was into ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. Not ’60s. Not The Beatles. Not Jimi Hendrix. Not Bob Dylan (that would come later). But ’50s rock ‘n’ roll and ’70s soul music.”

He went on to say that he was a huge fan of Elvis. He said that the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll never fulfilled his potential as a movie star but he was a great musician. While that might sound like an insult to the “Can’t Help Falling in Love” singer, many of Elvis’ fans agree with Tarantino completely. There’s a reason Elvis is known as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and not the King of Movies.

Tarantino isn’t a big Beatles fan — but even he recognizes the brilliance of Yellow Submarine.