LYON, France — Greeted with a standing applause by the 5,000-strong audience at Lyon’s Lumière Festival, Quentin Tarantino took to the stage Saturday night to talk about 1970, an idea which he’s been kicking around for four years.

No, it’s not a movie project. It could be a book one day, or a symposium, Tarantino said. Right now, however, it’s the title of a film program of 15 Hollywood movies selected by Tarantino, all made in or around 1970, which screen this week at France’s Lumière Festival.

Tarantino provided the climax to a 90-minute festival opening gala show hosted by Lumiere Fest head Thierry Fremaux, mounting the stage for a 15-minute introduction to the first film in the retro, George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, which opened the Lumière Festival Saturday night.

And Tarantino did so with his customary emphatic lapidary style, while using the occasion to place “Butch Cassidy” in a larger context. What makes the year 1970 so special for Tarantino? Two things maybe.

“The problem with any revolution is now the revolutionaries have to govern,” Quentin Tarantino said on stage.

“From 1967, there was the struggle between old Hollywood and what became known as New Hollywood. If you look at ’67, with “The Graduate,” and “Bonny and Clyde” being nominated for an Academy Award, you had a situation where new Hollywood had won, but they didn’t know it,” Tarantino explained. He went on: “But by 1970, New Hollywood was THE Hollywood, and anything that even smacked of old Hollywood was dead on arrival.”

So 1970, which boasted a rich annual output, was when New Hollywood “learned to exist. If 1970 hadn’t worked, there would be no ‘Godfather,’ there would be no ‘Exorcist,’ there would be no ‘Chinatown’,” Tarantino said.

Tarantino’s selection includes intriguing double bills: Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story” and Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Deep End” – in a lineup which demonstrates the breadth of Tarantino’s tastes and influences. Other titles take in Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces,” Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point.”

There’s a more personal reason, however, for Tarantino’s choice of “Butch Cassidy” to kick off the season. As a kid, aged six, visiting Hollywood for the first time, it was the first film Tarantino ever saw in Hollywood, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “So the first time I ever saw Hollywood I ended up seeing Butch Cassidy that night,” Tarantino told the Lumiere Fest gala audience.

About four years ago, in Paris, and having not seen “Butch Cassidy” a lot since, he learnt that the cinema in the Latin Quarter that he always goes to was having a whole week-long engagement of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“I saw the film and was just completely taken with it all over again, in an experience not to dissimilar to when I was six years old.”

He went to a little bar across the street from the cinema and “sat for two hours writing,” Tarantino said. He went on: “And I thought: “I loved George Roy Hill’s films when I was younger; why haven’t I taken him as seriously since I’ve become a filmmaker?”

It is this mix of the personal confession and fan buff reflection – caught in the Lumière Festival’s multiple presentations of classic films by stars, star directors and star writers – which is one reason which makes the festival, in the eyes of its many fans, so great.

Walter Hill, the subject of a Lumière tribute, Monica Bellucci, Christopher Lambert, Agnes Varda, Jean-Pierre Jennet and Jerry Schatzberg were among the audience listening to Tarantino. French director Bertrand Tavernier, who will unveil his documentary on French cinema, “My Journey through French Cinema” at the Festival, delivered tell anecdotes about Marcel Carné and George Roy Hill, whom he praised for his “valor.”

The Festival world premiered at its opening gala “Two Snails Go Out For a Walk,” co-directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a three-minute animated feature set to a poem by Jacques Prevert, made as a homage to Marcel Carné. The gala also showcased Agnes Varda’s “Les fiances du pont Mac Donald,” a three-minute mock silent movie, co-starring Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard, and part of Varda’s “Cleo de 5 a 7.”

Jamie Lang contributed to this article