Writer-director Quentin Tarantino is a sponge. He soaks up culture and splatters it back on to movie screens, giving known iconography new appearances, new textures, and new substance. He is a doer and a watcher, giving him plenty of opinions outside the scope of his own work. In a new interview previewing this December's The Hateful Eight, New York magazine asks Tarantino to deliver a kind of cinematic State of the Union. What does the future hold for the filmic medium? And does he give a crap about any of it? The director quickly draws opinions left and right, delivering a lethal blow to writer Nic Pizzolatto's baby, True Detective.

I tried to watch the first episode of season one, and I didn't get into it at all. I thought it was really boring. And season two looks awful. Just the trailer—all these handsome actors trying to not be handsome and walking around looking like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. It's so serious, and they're so tortured, trying to look miserable with their mustaches and grungy clothes.

Now, what Tarantino does love is Aaron Sorkin's three-season drama The Newsroom. Maligned by critics and hate-watched by a dedicated few (though decent ratings indicate some out there sincerely enjoyed it), the series became a symbol for Sorkinisms. And the Pulp Fiction director loved it. 

Why would it be surprising that I like the best dialogue writer in the business?

Tarantino is the rare Hollywood visionary who revels in his own transparency. In the most recent Sight & Sound poll, he was thrilled to declare his top 10 films of all time: Apocalypse Now, The Bad News Bears, Carrie, Dazed & Confused, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, The Great Escape, His Girl Friday, Jaws, Pretty Maids All in a Row, Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, Taxi Driver. The director's real eccentrics came out when weighing in on his favorite movies of a given year. In 2013, he cited Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine and Kick Ass 2 as a cut above the rest. His 2011 picks included the Spanish thriller The Skin I Live In and The Three Musketeers, from the director of Resident Evil. Tarantino told New York that finishing The Hateful Eight has kept him away from the movies this year, but he was a big fan of Kingsman and the horror movie It Follows, despite a few problems.

It was the best premise I've seen in a horror film in a long, long, long time. It's one of those movies that's so good you get mad at it for not being great... He could have kept his mythology straight. He broke his mythology left, right, and center.

By absorbing so much film, Tarantino has a keen awareness of his place in the universe. He knows he's routinely crafting some of America's best films. He knows he deserved his two writing Oscars. And he knows who else is living up to that excellence. Like David O. Russell.

The Fighter or American Hustle—those will be watched in 30 years... Part of that is the explosion of David O. Russell's talent, which had always been there but really coalesced in that movie. I think he's the best actor's director, along with myself, working in movies today. And The Fighter had impeccable casting.

Tarantino isn't completely lost in cinematic hypnosis. He's aware of the outside world. That's one of the reasons he's amped for The Hateful Eight to arrive later this year. It's a movie that he sees as playing right into the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

My movie is about the country being torn apart by [the Civil War], and the racial aftermath, six, seven, eight, ten years later... [anger over events in Baltimore and Ferguson] was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now. We're not trying to make it timely. It is timely. I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it's another '60s moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change. I'm hopeful that that's happening now.

To hear Tarantino praise indie mavens Mark and Jay Duplass, insult the Wachowskis and their sequel Matrix Reloaded, respect Marvel comic book movies, and imagine what '90s horror movie he would have liked to direct, read New York magazine's full interview.