Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated

243 Pages·2013·1.3 MB·English

by  Gerald Peary

Quentin Tarantino: Interviews
Revised and Updated
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
Quentin Tarantino
INTERVIEWS
Revised and Updated
Edited by Gerald Peary
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American
University Presses.
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tarantino, Quentin.
Quentin Tarantino : interviews / edited by Gerald Peary. — Revised and
updated [edition].
pages cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series) Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-874-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-61703-875-4 (ebook) 1.
Tarantino, Quentin—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Interviews. I. Peary, Gerald. II. Title.
PN1998.3.T358A5 2013
791.4302’33092—dc23 2013023360
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
Filmography
Interview at Cannes
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1992
A Talk with Quentin Tarantino
Gerald Peary / 1992
Interview with Quentin Tarantino
Peter Brunette / 1992
Reservoir Dogs Press Conference
Toronto International Film Festival / 1992
Answers First, Questions Later
Graham Fuller / 1993
Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction
Manohla Dargis / 1994
Interview with Quentin Tarantino
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1994
When You Know You’re in Good Hands
Gavin Smith / 1994
Four X Four
Peter Biskind / 1995
Interview: Quentin Tarantino
J. Hoberman / 1996
Out of the Past: Quentin Tarantino—On Ambition, Exploitation, and Playing
Psycho
Don Gibalevich / 1996
Quentin Tarantino: Press Conference on Jackie Brown
Transcribed by Peter Keough / 1997
Quentin Tarantino on Adapting Rum Punch, Moving the Story to LA, Elmore
Leonard’s Opinion
Adrian Wootton / 1998
The Mouth and the Method
Erik Bauer / 1998
Quentin Tarantino Reveals Almost Everything That Inspired Kill Bill
Tomohiro Machiyama / 2003
An Interview with Quentin Tarantino
Jeff Otto / 2003
Total Tarantino
Mary Kaye Schilling / 2004
Tarantino Bites Back
Nick James / 2008
Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds Interview
Kam Williams / 2009
Quentin Tarantino: The Inglourious Basterds Interview
Ella Taylor / 2009
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Interview
Mali Elfman / 2009
Pulp and Circumstance: Tarantino Rewrites History
Terry Gross / 2009
Days of Gloury
Ryan Gilbey / 2009
Ryan Gilbey / 2009
Tarantino “Unchained”: Django Trilogy
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. / 2012
Additional Resources
Index
Introduction
In this indolent age of Netflix and Hulu on demand, think back to VHS days,
when renting videos meant actually having to leave your comfy flat. But the
compensation back then was interacting with your favorite video store
employee. You remember, don’t you? That t-shirted guy or gal, embarrassingly
overqualified, who didn’t let a seven-dollar-an-hour salary curb an energetic
discourse about film, film, film, whether European auteurist masterpieces,
Hollywood genre works, or Hong Kong kung-fu?
Quentin Tarantino, twenty-eight, was exactly that appealing person, as he
arrived in January 1992 at the Sundance Film Festival. He was a California-
reared, self-proclaimed “film geek” with five intense years behind the counter at
Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives, where he devoured countless movies,
chattered incessantly about them, and developed a game plan about making them
himself. Now he’d struck gold with the premiere at Park City of his first feature,
Reservoir Dogs, with credits as actor-writer-director.
In August–September 1992 Tarantino accompanied Reservoir Dogs to both
the Montreal and Toronto Film Festivals. Everyone who encountered “Quentin”
(he was hardly “Mr. Tarantino”) met the most approachable and affable of
filmmakers. Buoyed by the sudden spotlight, he had a jolly time sounding off
with journalists and critics about cinema in general—just as he’d done at Video
Archives—and about his movie.
He seemed to have absorbed, in making Reservoir Dogs, every type of film,
grindhouse to arthouse; but he’d also propped up his cinema by leaning on
American literature. Among his bookish influences: J. D. Salinger’s Glass
family tales, the hardboiled novels of Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, and
Jim Thompson. He also grooved on pop TV: The Partridge Family and
Baywatch.
In Toronto, Tarantino became the charismatic epicenter of a wildly
entertaining press conference, where he was joined by Reservoir Dogs actors
Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, and Tim Roth. The text of the
press conference is printed here, as well as a Montreal interview with critic Peter
Brunette, now deceased, who was the original series editor for the University
Press of Mississippi Conversations with Filmmakers series. This astute Q&A
shows why his talents (and person) are so missed. With Brunette, Tarantino
talked of structuring Reservoir Dogs as a dark gallows comedy: “I like the idea
that the audience is laughing and that, BOOM, the next minute there is blood on
the walls.” He also declared an unabashed romance with the all-American junk-
food life style: “There’s something very lovely in that, though I’m maybe saying
it’s very lovely because it’s my culture. It’s me!”
I also interviewed Tarantino in Montreal, where he confided to me a bedtime
dream he once had, of attending a party at the home of director Howard Hawks,
along with guests Robert Mitchum and John “Duke” Wayne. I also learned of his
adoration for Nouvelle Vague cineastes, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre
Melville.
I asked Tarantino a favor. He was coming soon to Boston, where I taught, to
meet with local press before the Reservoir Dogs opening. “Is there any chance
that you could drop by my Boston University course on the French New Wave
and say a few words?” A week later, he strolled into BU. It was mid-September
1992, and I said (how can I forget?): “Class, this is Quentin Tarantino. You
don’t know yet who he is, because his film hasn’t played in Boston. But you
will: it’s a great first feature.” The students stared at him: he looked cool (a
favorite Tarantino word), even if they had to take my word for his talent.
I explained: “Quentin has come to talk to us about French New Wave
cinema.” And away he went! I’d hoped for a few minutes; he gave an hour-and-
a-half, a spontaneous soliloquy about the wonders of the Nouvelle Vague, not
only about the great films the directors had made (he knew these, forwards and
backwards) but about their hyperbolic writings in the magazine Cahiers du
Cinéma. I remember him paraphrasing Godard in Cahiers enraptured by a war
picture made by Douglas Sirk: “What a great title: A Time to Love and a Time to
Die! And any film with a title that great must be … a great film!”
Curiously, Tarantino didn’t speak at all about Reservoir Dogs. His heart and
soul were in Paris in the 1960s; and we at Boston University were too
mesmerized by his storytelling to remember to videotape this onetime
happening. Our loss! September 1992 also saw the first published “career”
interview with Tarantino, a discussion with Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret
in the French magazine Positif about Quentin’s film-saturated childhood, his
pre–Reservoir Dogs effort to make a feature, My Best Friend’s Birthday, and his
two long-ago-written screenplays, True Romance and Natural Born Killers.
In October 1992 Reservoir Dogs opened theatrically in the U.S. America’s
best critics wrote at length about it, praising Tarantino’s precocious talents, his
cheeky dialogue, his deftness with genre; but some raised objections to the
film’s unapologetic dallying in violence. For example, Ella Taylor in the LA
Weekly provided a sharp rebuke for Reservoir Dogs’ torture-by-straight-razor
scene, labeling it an exercise in “spurious, sadistic manipulation … pure gratuity,
without mercy for the viewer.”
The questioning of Tarantino’s violence has persisted through the years. The
filmmaker has been consistent, interview after interview, in dismissing such
criticism. Screen violence is not, he says, the same as real-life butchery, which
he abhors. But he savors well-turned scenes of violence in other people’s
movies, and he gets pleasure himself in orchestrating such scenes. For Tarantino,
violence in cinema is a matter of taste, just as people like or dislike dance
movies, or westerns. As for social responsibility, Tarantino claims that he has
only artistic responsibility, to be true to his characters. If they are cold-blooded
killers, so be it.
His second feature, Pulp Fiction, which some consider his all-time
masterpiece, had its world premiere in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival,
winning the much-coveted Palme d’Or. In a short time, Tarantino had become so
stupendously popular that his interviews were monitored and restricted by hired
PR. The wide-open days of Reservoir Dogs were over, probably forever.
Journalists at Cannes were marched in for five to ten minutes chats, hardly time
for serious discussions with the filmmaker about this ambitious, deeply
complicated work.
Fortunately, there were exceptions.
Tarantino sat down with Manohla Dargis, writing for Sight & Sound, and
plotted for her the process of his moviemaking. As he had done for Reservoir
Dogs, he teamed with French critics Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for a
substantive Pulp Fiction discussion. (For inclusion in this book, the originally-
in-English magazine interview, translated into French for Positif, was put back
into English by Boston University film professor, T. Jefferson Kline.) Perhaps
the most in-depth conversation about what occurs on-screen in Pulp Fiction was
with Gavin Smith, Film Comment editor. It’s a model of a brilliantly informed
Q&A.
Pulp Fiction opened in the U.S. in October 1994 to rousing reviews and
excellent box office, and, at that point, practically every major American
newspaper sported a Tarantino interview. But what were the consequences for
the filmmaker of such exhaustive exposure? Too much Tarantino? A year later,
before the opening of his anthology film, Four Rooms, Tarantino sounded, for
the first time, bruised and burned. Talking with Premier’s Peter Biskind, he
voiced unhappiness about the reviews for his acting turn in Robert Rodriguez’s
1995 feature, Desperado. Every critic, he felt, was saying, “We’re sick of this
guy. We don’t want to see his face anymore.”
As far as I can determine, Tarantino did no solo interviews when Four Rooms