Quentin Tarantino is a force to be reckoned with in the filmmaking world. His distinct brand of arthouse action in which he uses violence to deconstruct cinema is heavily influenced by the films of the director’s youth. In his novel, Cinema Speculation, Tarantino celebrates the Blaxploitation genre and its use of violence and language to comment on social issues.
While his films aren’t as deep as certain films from that era, Tarantino’s ultra-cool and stylishly violent movies like Pulp Fictionand Django Unchained have found some negative attention from hyper-conservative critics.
Tarantino has faced backlash for his cinematic violence and use of the N-word since the beginning of his career, but he has always been defended by other filmmakers and talent. But having filmmakers and notable celebrities on your side doesn’t always mean that the general public agrees with how Tarantino deals with sensitive material in his work.
During his promotional tour for his quasi-autobiographical book, Cinema Speculation, Tarantino spoke plainly about the many controversies around the subject matter and dialogue in the filmmaker’s work. According to Variety, when Chris Wallace asked on the host’s HBO Max talk show about his use of graphic violence and the N-word, Tarantino said, “See something else.”
'Pulp Fiction'Credit: Miramax Films
Tarantino on His Controversial Subject Material
On the talk show, Wallace asked Tarantino, “So when people say, ‘Well there’s too much violence in his movies. He uses the N-word too often.’ You say what?”
“Then see something else,” Tarantino responded. “If you have a problem with my movies, then they aren’t the movies to go see. Apparently, I’m not making them for you.”
Samuel L. Jackson, who has starred in Tarantino films from Pulp Fiction to Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, has long defended his collaborator’s use of the N-word, which is often tied to historical context. “It needs to be an element of what the story is about. A story is [about] context—but just to elicit a laugh? That’s wrong,” Jackson said earlier this year to the Times.
Jackson said, “Every time someone wants an example of overuse of the N-word, they go to Quentin—but it’s unfair. He’s just telling the story and the characters do talk like that. When Steve McQueen does it [with 12 Years a Slave], it’s art. He’s an artist. Quentin’s just a popcorn filmmaker.”
While some actors like Leonardo DiCaprio have questioned Tarantino’s overuse of the N-word while filming Django Unchained, Jackson and Tarantino said that it is a part of the story and serves a purpose.
'Django Unchained'Credit: The Weinstein Company
Yes, the slur is a slur, and I assume Tarantino understands this when he is writing his screenplays since he hasn’t used the word to evoke laughs from audiences. Instead, Tarantino is being a writer and is trying to capture the truth of the moment he has created. Whether the audience agrees with his writing or not is merely an opinion.
Violence in Tarantino’s films has always been a strange subject. The violence can be extreme, but, like the use of language, it speaks to a truth that Tarantino has created.
Whether or not you like Tarantino’s work or have a problem with his use of language or violence is a personal matter that shouldn’t discredit the filmmaker’s talent and uniqueness in cinema.
The conversation around his work and how it affects communities or groups of people is a subject that exists outside of the world Tarantino has created, and they are conversations that should be happening.
At the same time, we have to give credit to Tarantino as a filmmaker who has revolutionized modern cinema.
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
'Pulp Fiction'Credit: Miramax Films
'Django Unchained'Credit: The Weinstein Company
