6 Trademark Tarantino Shots
INTRODUCTION
Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking shows a deep reverence for the history of cinema. He often pulls from the work of other directors and genre tropes - paying homage through his distinct and stylised shot selection. Whether from Italian Spaghetti Westerns or classic Kung Fu movies.
So, let’s break down six different shots which he has often repeated through his filmography, show how they are done, what effect they have and how they can be used to elevate scenes.
1 - CIRCULAR DOLLY
When it comes to moving the camera during a shot, one of the most traditional, well established guidelines is to only move with characters when it is motivated by their own motion. So if they walk in a straight line, the camera may track with them, but once they come to a stop, generally, the camera will stop.
Tarantino breaks this rule by moving the camera in an unmotivated way even when the characters themselves aren’t moving - especially during dialogue scenes.
He’s done this in multiple movies with a circular dolly shot, or arc shot. This is a specialised move where the camera gradually and steadily moves in a circle around the characters - who are usually seated.
Dollies are very heavy platforms with four wheels and a hydraulic arm which the tripod head and camera can be mounted on. Filmmakers can either use it as a way to easily push around and position the heavy production camera for a stationary shot, or they can place the dolly on top of a track where it can be smoothly slid along to get stable camera moves.
Usually these tracks are straight and designed to do moves like push ins, pull outs or side on tracking where the camera moves in one directional line.
However, more niche circular dolly tracks also exist. Two form a semi-circle. Four can be connected to form a circle: inside which actors can be placed. When the dolly is pushed around this track it gives a smooth, orbital movement.
Note that Tarantino uses this move quite sparingly and only for a specific purpose. Most shots in dialogue scenes he shoots with a stationary camera.
A circular move makes a shot more dynamic and interesting - especially for longer scenes without active blocking where actors don’t move around. It focuses the audience's attention on a central point - while also giving context to the space the characters are in.
When done at a slow speed it can aid in ratcheting up the tension in a scene. In certain contexts it can feel a bit voyeuristic like we’re a predator circling prey.
Or in other contexts this movement can add a light, natural, organic interplay in a group by letting us move from person to person, better establishing each character’s emotions, reactions and body language without having to intercut more rigidly between each actor’s line of dialogue.
2 - TRUNK SHOT
From his first film, Reservoir Dogs, and throughout almost every movie since, Tarantino always seems to fit in a trunk shot - where the camera, with a wide angle lens, is positioned in the boot of a car shooting up from a low angle.
Most filmmakers shoot most shots at a neutral angle - where the camera is roughly positioned at the head height of each character and is placed horizontally straight without any upwards or downwards tilt.
Tarantino often makes frames more stylistic by either shooting them from higher up, pointing down, called a high angle, or lower to the ground pointing up at characters, like a trunk shot, which is called a low angle.
This shot serves a few purposes. For one, it focuses the audience’s gaze only onto the characters and their dialogue exchange. For another, by shooting a low angle from a trunk’s point of view, it hides the contents inside the car, creating suspense, or delaying showing information until a later reverse shot.
There’s also a commonly held belief that shooting characters from a low angle makes them feel more powerful and dominant. He’ll often play with this high angle, low angle dynamic when writing and blocking scenes - placing characters in different positions of power at different heights. Often shooting characters in the position of strength - whether that’s physically, ethically or psychologically - from a low angle.
3 - CRASH ZOOM
One genre that Tarantino often pays homage to are Kung Fu movies. And a trademark stylistic trope from many of these films was the use, and sometimes the overuse, of a crash zoom.
A crash, whip or snap zoom is a shot where the operator rapidly zooms either in or out on a lens - changing the shot size from wide or tight, or from tight to wide.
Zoom lenses have internal glass elements which can be shifted inside the barrel by rotating the zoom gear outside the lens. This changes the focal length of the lens which determines the field of view. For example, going from a wide focal length like 24mm to a telephoto focal length like 150mm.
For a crash zoom to have a greater effect there needs to be a greater difference between the widest focal length on the zoom and longest focal length. To do a smaller punch in the zoom lens only needs to cover a more limited focal length range.
Because this zoom needs to be done rapidly, cinematographers usually rotate the barrel manually with their hand - sometimes using a zoom bar - a small spigot that screws into the barrel to give operators leverage to rotate it more precisely and easily.
Another option is to align a zoom motor with the gears on the barrel, which is wired to a microforce zoom control handle. This can be used to set in and out points on a zoom, control the speed of the zoom, and allows operators to manually control when to activate the motor to zoom the lens by holding down a button. It’s an especially useful tool for doing slightly slower zooms at a consistent speed, without a manual jerking to the zoom.
A crash zoom is kind of like an exclamation mark on a sentence. It’s used to rapidly heighten and intensify the emotions in a shot. It can be used to emphasise an unexpected or important moment like a character reveal or a moment of revelation or shock.
Tarantino also uses these zooms in rapid succession with quick cuts during moments of action or fight scenes, injecting them with energy.
Because this shot is extremely stylised and a bit melodramatic, in some cases it can also add a bit of humour.
4 - SPAGHETTI WESTERN CLOSE UP
When choosing a shot, the first thing to consider is how wide, or how tight, it needs to be. A close up is a shot that almost every director uses.
Although this is a common shot, what makes Tarantino’s close ups a bit different is how he frames them.
He likes using very tight close ups which are somewhere in the middle of a traditional close up, which includes the top of the head and shoulders of an actor, and an extreme close up which focuses on a tight facial detail of the actor such as their eyes.
These frames chop off the top of the actor’s head, which is called giving them a haircut, usually place the actor quite central in the shot, and tend to use longer focal length lenses which compress the background.
This framing is a definite homage to one of his favourite directors Sergio Leone, who often used this style of tight close up framing in many of his Spaghetti Western movies.
These close ups enormously expand the actor’s presence and allow audience’s to observe minute details in performances. They are especially impactful when combined with another editing technique that he also pulls from Leone’s films - cutting from very wide shots with spatial context of the environment, into these huge, punchy, impactful close ups to keenly read the emotions of the characters.
Creating a large contrast between the shot sizes in the editing, which ratchets up the tension the closer the camera gets to the actor’s face.
5 - ECU INSERT
Moving from one type of close up to another, we have the extreme close up insert shot. Sometimes called a cutaway, this is where the camera cuts away from shots showing the performance of the actors, to a shot of a specific detail or object, before returning to showing the characters.
Tarantino often uses this shot when he wants to communicate information to the audience - telling them that this object on screen has great importance in the story.
They can also be used as a type of POV to show the audience a specific detail of what the character is looking at.
By shooting these shots extremely tightly and juxtaposing them with wider frames, like how he treats his Spaghetti Western close ups, they can also be used to create more tension within a scene.
Tarantino also likes to make audience’s deliberately uncomfortable by showing experiential details, whether that’s graphic violence, or cutting into ECU insert shots like injections to make the audience uneasy, rather than cutting wide to hide these moments.
6 - COWBOY SHOT
The final shot which he often uses, once again, pays homage to the history of cinema, specifically the Western genre. It’s called a cowboy shot. This comes from it being used in old Westerns to frame the actor as well as the gun which sits in a holster on their hip.
Its width is somewhere in the middle of a medium shot, where the waist or stomach is the bottom of the frame, and a wide shot, which includes the feet of the character.
A cowboy shot can be a stationary frame, combined with camera movement, or even a crash zoom. Tarantino likes to use this same angle even when guns and shoot outs aren’t necessarily a part of the story.
A large part of how Tarantino uses this shot comes from the dynamic between the foreground and background. He’ll often incorporate two characters into this shot by placing the camera behind one of them at around the hip level, or sometimes over the shoulder, framing them either left or frame right in the foreground. The other side of the shot will then be open to capture another person in the background from the waist up in a cowboy frame.
This shot works as a way of pitting characters against each other, whether in a dialogue exchange or an exchange of bullets.
Single cowboy shots can also be used to see what a character is holding, or what is on their hip, while still remaining close enough to be able to read their performance, without pulling back all the way to a wide shot.