The very first character we meet in the Oscar-nominated anthology of revenge stories, Wild Tales, is a critic. Is there some significance to this? Hearing the low chuckle at the other end of the line, I’m thinking yes.

“You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them,” says writer-director Damián Szifrón, calling the Straight from his home in Buenos Aires. “I do care about the opinion of the critics, but I care more about the opinions of the moviegoers. I work for them, not the critics.”

Later in our conversation, Szifrón will amend his words slightly to state that he also works for the man who passed along his appetite for movies. “My father. He had a very open and free mind, so he showed me everything.”

The elder Szifrón raised a proud populist, and a talented one. Oscar nomination and standing ovation at Cannes aside, Wild Tales, which opens Friday (March 6), is a straight-up crowd-pleaser. That pre-credit sequence, the first of six stories, is a masterpiece of economy, surprise, and deeply black humour, ending with a shot so spectacular and crazy that a 3-D rendering would be considered dangerous to the viewer.

The other five stories are no less brilliant. Argentina is a pretty good place to be a filmmaker these days, but anyone with eyes to see would expect Hollywood to be kissing Szifrón’s Latin American hem. The 39-year-old says he wouldn’t turn down the chance.

“For me, it’s a very natural thing. Cinema is something international, eternal, universal; it doesn’t belong to a country or a city,” he says. “And, actually, Hollywood was made by people from many, many different places. If you think of the classic directors, most of them came from Europe: Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder—it was Billy ‘Veelder’, actually, ‘Veelder’—Vincente Minnelli, a lot of them.”

Szifrón adds that although his film-school pals were obsessing over the French new wave, “I was looking at Spielberg, Brian De Palma, John Carpenter, William Friedkin, Scorsese, Coppola, of course—those were the ones for me.” The Godfather, meanwhile, is the pinnacle of the art, in Szifrón’s mind. “Take any shot from the film and it’s perfect. It’s miraculous.”

There are miracles in Wild Tales, not the least of them being that Szifrón’s anthology movie—in contrast to almost any other anthology movie, ever—maintains its quality from start to finish. “In general, I thought of music, and albums,” he says. “You have five tracks, six tracks, one is five minutes, one is 25 minutes, but they’re all composed for the same instruments, and they work separately and also they work as a whole. If you listen to the entire album, you feel something different than listening to one track.”

Even more remarkable—serendipitous, even—is the way Szifrón’s story ideas came to him in their finished sequence, often prompted by an image from real life. A loan shark who menaced his family makes his way into one segment; Szifrón’s own frustrations with parking infractions prompted another. Each one is so strong that I wonder if he laments not saving any for its own feature?

“No,” Szifrón demurs. “I don’t have a lot to add. When you achieve that, when you’re brief, you’re telling things in a powerful way; there’s nothing to regret.”