Interviews: Quentin Tarantino
Since Inglourious Basterds debuts this weekend, I thought why not focus on the movie’s of writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has 17 writing credits including Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Natural Born Killers (1994), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and Grindhouse (2007).
A friend was up for the gig of production designer for Resevoir Dogs, so I got to read the script before the movie even began production. When I finished the first act, I called my friend and said, “This is either going to be brilliant or a complete disappointment.” When I got done with the script, I called my friend back and said, “It’s brilliant.” And then came Pulp Fiction, one of the best screenplays written in the last two decades.
Here are several written interviews — and excerpts — with Tarantino:
Crave Online
CraveOnline: How about turning the tables where in your film, the girls actually become more badass than Kurt Russell?
Quentin Tarantino: It’s actually not foreign to the genres that we’re dealing with. These type of B movies and especially if you go to the kung fu movies of the ’70s in Hong Kong or even in Japan, the female avenger has always been a staple there. Those were the movies that allowed women to do that. Not the Hollywood movies. But even my film is using the slasher film structure and that is the third act of every slasher film is the final girl going on and vanquishing the boogey man because she is the one with the moral fortitude that can wipe them out.
J.B. I’m not trying to draw any direct comparisons to other
films, but what is “RESERVOIR DOGS” like?
Q.T. It’s like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, “BOB THE
GAMBLER,” “LE DOULOS,” which is my favorite screenplay
of all time, with Jean-Paul Belmondo; it’s fantastic.
He did “LE SAMURAI” with Alain Delon. He made, like,
the coolest gangster films ever. They’re, like,
fantastic. His films were like he took the Bogart,
Cagney, the Warner Brothers gangster films, all right,
he loved those, and a lot of times he just took the
stories from them and did them with Belmondo or Delon or
Jean Gabin and just gave them a different style, a
different coolness, you know, they had this French
Gallic thing going through it, yet they were still
trying to be like their American counterparts, but they
had a different rhythm all their own. Then I took those
movies and threw an L.A. right-now into them. So it’s
like a crossbreed, giving birth to this, giving birth to
this…
J.B. It’s like a samurai movie that becomes a western, then
goes back to being a samurai movie.
Q.T. Yeah. It’s like they keep going back on themselves.
When did you finally write the script for Inglourious Basterds?
Quentin Tarantino: I literally started in January of last year, and I wrote January through to July. The first two chapters in the movie are made up of older material. I did a little rewrite on them, but it’s older material. Everything from chapter three to the end I wrote in that big go.
Were you aware of any pressure while writing it? Of all the projects you’ve talked about, this one has been the kind of Holy Grail…
QT: Not really, because I felt the same way about it too! If I couldn’t make it as good as thought it should be then I would have just not done it. But I knew I had to write it, I knew I had to finish, even if it I ended up not doing it, just to get it out of my system. Just to move it out to the side so I could find the next thing. I had to climb that mountain before I could see where any other mountain was. Because I had thought about maybe not doing it. And in a weird way it was kinda liberating. Just letting go of the idea of doing it kinda steered me back to it.
And this video interview: