She's reviewing Godard's movie and she says :
"It's as if a couple of movie-crazy young Frenchmen
were in a coffee- coffee house
and they've taken a banal American crime novel
and they're making a movie out of it based not on the novel,
but on the poetry that they read between the lines."
And when I read that, I was like : "that's my aesthetic"
"That's what I want to do."
"That is what I want to achieve."
Well, he was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1963 to a woman who was half Cherokee and half southern white.
She named him after Burt Reynolds' character, "Quint", in Gunsmoke.
They moved to Los Angeles when he was two and she took him to the movies regularly.
When I was a really really little boy like, you know, four or something like that.
I'd watch TV, movies with my stepfather.
We're watching some movie and he's : "Oh, could you see that guy right there? That's Thomas Mitchell."
"He was the father in the original "Swiss Family Robinson" from the 30's." -"Oh, really? Huh."
And then we see some other : "See, that's Roddy McDowall. He's a really good actor, I like him."
"And he was a star even when he was a little boy !"
I actually thought : "Oh, I guess that's what happens. When you get to be an adult you become a movie genius !"
So I'd better start, like, get all prepared !"
And Quentin would go on to tell you who the supporting cast was, who the DP was...
At the store, putting films in people's hands and arguing my points
to why this movie was good or why that movie was bad.
There was a whole aspect of me getting in touch with an audience beyond just myself.
Of what actually worked with audiences and what they liked.
You want to see three movies that, if I were gonna be, like, trapped on a desert island
and I could go to video archives before I was gonna get trapped on a desert island,
what three movie I would take with me.
One of the movies would be Brian De Palma's "Blow Out".
John Travolta, by the way, gives one of the best performances of all time in this film.
And he just went into this : "Do you know what Francois Truffaut thought about you?"
"Do you know what Pauline Kael thought about you?"
"Do you know how brilliant you were in the blahblah..." and I'm almost in tears now, thinking "well, yeah"
"But I didn't know what someone cared that much about all that", you know, and clearly he did.
Well, I was like look, uh, I think he's a terrific actor
I think what you should do is you should watch him in Brian DePalma's "Blow Out" and if you don't think he's a terrific actor,
then maybe we should talk about "should we do this movie together?".
He decided that there's only one person that can play that role.
And that's you.
He has to fight with the studio because they don't want me in it, but he only wanted me.
I wanna dance.
That morning, I got her and John together in a trailer,
and I showed them the dance sequence from this movie, "Bande à part".
You know, that little, like, with the three of them :
And I go : "That's right. They're not dancers."
"They're not executing a dance perfectly, but (??) the greatest dancers in the world. They're having fun.
They're not dancing well, but they're actually dancing great !
Because they're having fun and I'm enjoying watching them enjoying doing the dance.
That's what I want you to do." And they've both got it. They've just, once they saw that, they just "Okay.
I know exactly what you want. Let's do it."
For Vince's twist, I wanted him to :
But when Mia twists,
the image that I had in my mind was
the zsa zsa gabor cat from the Aristocats. And there's that one little scene where the Aristocats dance and she's like :
He's talked about how he loves certain scenes, classic scenes from other movies and what he's done is just rolled one after another.
Godard is the one who taught me the fun and the freedom and the joy of breaking rules, you know.
Just setting up a close-up on the back of somebody's head as opposed to, you know.
And just fucking around with an entire medium.
It's what it is, it's American vernacular, and Tarantino is able to listen to it very carefully,
because the dialogue is getting to be more carefully written,
more character-oriented and more interesting,
instead of simply being easily subtitled for the foreign release.
When a movie really, really does it to me,
it's because it's made me feel many different emotions during the course of it
and especially if I can pull off contradictory emotions.
I want to play you as an audience.
I want to be the conductor and
you're my orchestra.
And the sounds that I make you to make and the feelings I get you to feel,
and then I stop you from feeling those feelings and I give you something else to feel.
and then I stop you from feeling that and make you feel something else yet again.
Well, if a director can do that, if a director can pull it off,
well, that's a real lucky audience member
because you've really had an experience that night. You went to the movies.
That was fuckin trippy.
There's a French director named Jean-Pierre Melville
who came out in the 50s. He did a whole series of a crime films,
always set in Paris or Marseille or something.
They were basically the Warner Brothers Bogart Cagney films
Alright, but completely set to this French Parisian rhythm.
But they do it with a whole different style and a whole different perspective,
and here they basically reinvented the genre.
I'm delivering the goods, but I'm also trying to, you know, reinvent it in a way.
Quentin takes these genre elements and shifts them and in my perception
raises them on to a different level.
Yes, he does utilize the genre
but that's not really what it is about.
And in the Western section we find :
Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo".
This is, as far as I'm concerned, another one of the greatest movies ever made.
Ricky Nelson is so cool in this movie.
I'll tell you what I'm a lot better at, Mr Wheeler.
That's minding my own business.
If you're really going to make the western genre really work its magic
then you've got to do your version of it.
I came up with a cool bit because actually Franco Nero's in the movie
and it's a sequence where we actually had the two Django's in the same frame,
both Jamie Foxx and Franco Nero.
I have a Franco look at him. Look him up and down. Ask him his name.
Jamie says Django. "Can you spell it?"
And then he spells the whole thing
and then after he gets through spelling I had him say:
"The D is silent" and then Nero looks at him and says "I know".
A real meta movie moment.
I'm not only a big fan of the art film Western.
You gotta still make a Western first. So I'm actually proud that my films,
as offbeat as they may be, and my take on the given genre,
they still deliver the goods.
If you like a Western, you might like mine.
Since Quentin knows everything about every movie that's ever been made, just about,
there's references in the script to a lot of great shots.
"Taras Bulba", when Yul Brynner walks up to a guy that gives him a smart aleck response,
and Yul Brynner pulls the guy on the horse.
From "Wild Bill", there was a shot of a guy falling face-first in the mud and not saving himself.
It would be silly for me to try to do a John Ford type movie now.
You can appreciate them, but as far as actually being a piece that goes out and entertains the world,
they were made for a different audience.
They were made for a different America.
They were made- and particularly made for white people in the America of that time.
You know, most of the Western directors that are really terrific all have their own version of the West.
Corbucci had the most brutal,
violent,
bleakest West, and surreal.
And then using that fascist-led,
bleak, barren, brutal, violent, surreal West as a jumping-off point.
Well, what is the true American equivalent of that ?
And that would be being a slave in the (??)
So I wanted to do it like an exciting Western adventure and a genre movie first,
that uses slavery and the antebellum South as a backdrop
in order to tell this adventure.
And the adventure that he was down with and I was down with,
is of a black male rising up,
becoming a cowboy, becoming a spaghetti western hero,
becoming a folkloric hero and goes out and saves his woman.
She's in the pit of hell and he's going to go and extract her from that.
"Hey, little troublemaker."
I wanted to give black males and in particularly young black males,
a black cowboy hero.
And not just a fancified one,
he actually was a slave, and he was even doing it during slave times.
And this is sort of like, you know,
this is a Western for you. This is a hero.
I watched for my father "The Searchers".
Yeah, to me, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" was my Western that was kind of the "dad and son" film.
I think the conceit of the film, which I think is fantastic,
is Uma Thurman is Clint Eastwood in "the Man with No Name".
I mean, she's holding this masculine pose
and she takes this whole rule of the samurai all the way through this film.
It empowers girls by the fact that Uma Thurman is a female warrior.
She's a female avenger.
Right, revenge is like one of the classic staples in drama.
Because what he does is take the other side of the feminine, the dark side,
and puts it in foreground constantly.
She's not a victim. She's never a victim in this movie.
I don't think "Roots" actually aged that well if you look at it 34 years later.
The thing that really
gets me about "Roots", is you watch this whole thing,
that's on for 16 hours or something,
and you're actually living the lives of these people
and putting yourself in that place.
And if you remember the last episode of it,
Lloyd Bridges is one of the most hateful of all the racist guys in the movie
and there's Chicken George played by Ben Vereen,
who's one of the guys that you've been following the most.
At the end, they have Lloyd Bridges and they tie him to a tree
and Chicken George is going to whip him,
he's gonna give him a peeling to end all peelings.
And you've been waiting 16 hours for this
and naturally, he does the thing that they normally do in these movies,
he's like "No, no, no,"
"I can't do that. That would make me as bad as you."
And when he said that,
all over America, a hundred million people said:
"NO ! Whip his-"
He had it coming! He had it coming, it's about time for some payback!
Well, you don't have that problem with my movie.
You get payback.
It's really interesting that Quentin,
being the product of the culture that made Western possible at all,
where, do you know, because it's the American West of course,
that Quentin would take the genre, once removed into the Italian
and bring it back to America.
He takes like, a double turn.
In the laser disc section, we find
the Criterion version of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver".
With Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese in the little bit,
Cybill Shepherd, but no Harvey Keitel !
Which is very odd because he's one of the finest performances in this movie
as, we all know, "Sport".
"Taxi Driver", by Martin Scorsese,
Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" and Brian De Palma's "Blow Out".
If they share one thing, what is it?
I don't know what they share...
You know what, other than-
major directorial vision.
I started casting actors in Germany
and I wasn't finding anybody who quite had everything that I needed a hundred percent.
They could do the poetry in this language, but they couldn't do the poetry in that language.
I literally had a moment where I didn't think I was going to find it.
I can just tell you the day that Christoph came,
walked in the room, sat down, and read two scenes
I remember thinking, and Laurence was sitting right next to me, go:
"We're making a movie."
I think, you know, Quentin, being a poet,
uses language to create.
So this character does the same thing.
We leave out of the other war movies because in "Where Eagles Dare",
German is English, and apparently Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood
speak German so magnificently great,
all they have to do is put on a costume and they can hang out like at the general's club.
Forget about the fact I don't buy it.
It's also the fact that you've got, possibly one of the most suspenseful sequences here,
but you've pissing it away by English being German.
Right now, one of the things that's nice about this process right now
is that it allows me to be analytical and I actually start seeing what it is I've done.
So I took the scene where Mr. White brings in Mr. Orange to the warehouse
and Mr. Orange wants them to take him to a hospital.
It seems like a very obvious scene.
The very basic things,
especially from where Mr. Orange is coming from,
"I'm dying and I want to go to the hospital".
But just in writing those words, just all this stuff just started pouring out.
"Please hold me"
That was when I realized it was a father/son story going on
and all these weird connections that happen later,
I mean just little things in the case of "Reservoir Dogs", Mr. White keeps saying
"When Joe gets here,
which should be in time now,
he's gonna help you out,
he's gonna take care of you."
What happens when Joe gets here, he goes to kill him.
And Joe is Mr. White's version of a father, and all this kind of stuff.
So I finished it off, the writing, this subtexting about that one scene
and I go "Wow, there's a lot there,
that was a very interesting exercise.
Now I never need to do that ever again. I don't want to know these things.
I don't want to know it's a father-son story. I want to keep it up top.
I want to keep it about the scenario, because now I know it's there."
When you go to a movie and you see a certain sequence,
and if there is real cinematic power,
and there are certain filmmakers out there that you feel were touched by God to make movies.
There would be a combination of editing, and sound,
and usually it's like visual images connected with music or something.
But when those things work
and they really connect
and you know, an example could be the final gunfight sequence in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
It's just like you forget to breathe.
You are really transported to a different place
and music doesn't quite do that in on its own,
and novels don't quite do it, and the painting doesn't quite do it...
If you're in a theater and you're sharing the experience with a bunch of other people,
ah, it's just, it's just truly, truly thrilling.
I saw Quentin direct
and it was the most exciting, exhilarating thing I've ever seen.
He loves his actors.
There's already three of us in the close-up and he's focusing with delight on his face.
I'm very lucky to have work with some monumental directors.
I mean George Stevens, John Ford,
Hitchcock.
Though, I noticed about Quentin immediately:
I had never met such a passionate young director.
I think Quentin, by his sheer outrageous,
going against the rules and making something exciting,
will stand out more than any of the people I've told you I admire.
Now the violent intensity of "Pulp Fiction" calls to mind other violent watershed films
that were considered classics in their time and still are.
Hitchcock's "Psycho".
Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" and Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange".
Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry
and used the world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become.
That, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for "Pulp Fiction":
As all great films, it criticizes other movies.
If you just truly love cinema with enough passion
and you really love it
then you can't help but make a good movie.
When you're pleased to think, "you know, that take really worked. That was great."
He'd say : "Fantastic ! Let's go again."
We'd say "What ? Why we go again?"
"BECAUSE WE LOVE MAKING MOVIES !!!"
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