Quentin Tarantino Names the Director Who Perfected Martial Arts Brutality
Quentin Tarantino, maestro of old-school screen violence, just named his pick for the most brutally brilliant director in martial-arts cinema. He also traces the blood-soaked DNA of Kill Bill back to that lineage.
Quentin Tarantino talking about on-screen violence is basically a comfort food genre, but this time he went specific: he singled out one martial arts filmmaker he thinks truly gets brutality right. His pick? Lee Tso-Nam.
Why Tarantino is so into this stuff
Tarantino has always worn his love of old-school martial arts movies on his sleeve. You can feel it all over the two-part Kill Bill with Uma Thurman, and even when he is not making a martial arts film, he still leans hard into stylized violence. See: the gnarly detours in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The shout-out, and what makes it interesting
On a recent episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino zeroed in on Lee Tso-Nam, a veteran director behind a stack of 1970s and 1980s martial arts movies. What he loves about Tso-Nam is not just the choreography, but the way the fights are shot and cut. Back in the day, lots of filmmakers sped up the camera to juice the action. Tso-Nam did that too, but Tarantino says he did it with actual artistry. The fights are fast in a way that feels designed, not cheap. And more importantly, they register as painful.
- Tarantino highlighted Tso-Nam on the Pure Cinema Podcast as the standout for portraying violence.
- He praised the deliberate fastness of the fight scenes, not just generic speed-up.
- He said Tso-Nam was the only director who used that old camera-speed trick in a truly artistic way.
- He described the action in Tso-Nam’s films as painful — you feel the hits.
A quick primer on Lee Tso-Nam
If the name is new to you, he is considered one of the more prolific figures to come out of the Hong Kong scene, with a run of old-school martial arts films that turned into cult favorites over time. The guy made a lot of movies, and the fans stuck with them.
So, yes, it is very Tarantino to celebrate a filmmaking technique a lot of people write off as a shortcut — and then champion the one director who elevated it. That is the nerdy craft detail that matters to him, and honestly, it tracks.