Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino in 2009

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born 27 March 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American screenwriter, film director and actor. His films include Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained.

Quotes

• Watch the movie closely, and you’ll see how personal it is. Here’s a film in which cinema brings down the Nazi regime, metaphorically and literally. What could possibly be better than that? In this story, cinema changes the world, and I fucking love that idea!
  • Interview with The London Paper about Inglourious Basterds

• I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.
  • BBC interview

• Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment.
  • BBC interview

• I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.
  • Virgin.Net interview

• I look at Death Proof and realize I had too much time.
  • Q&A at hollywoodreporter.com

• I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages.
  • Empire magazine interview, 1994.

• I've got so many movies I would like to make. I've got my western, my World War II bunch of guys on a mission, my spaghetti western, my horror film. But since I know I won't live long enough to do all the movies I want to do, with every movie the goal is to wipe out as many as I can.
  • Interview, circa 1994; as quoted in Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2003) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 450

• Once a lonely caterpillar sat and cried,
  To a sympathetic beetle by his side.
  "I've got nobody to hug,
  I'm such an ugly bug."
  Then a spider and a dragon fly replied,
  "If you're serious and want to win a bride,
  Come along with us,
  To the glorious
  Annual ugly bug ball."
  Come on let's crawl
  Gotta crawl, gotta crawl
  To the ugly bug ball
  To the ball, to the ball
  And a happy time we'll have there
  One and all
  At the ugly bug ball
  While the crickets clicked their tricky melodies
  All the ants were fancy-dancing with the fleas
  Then up from under the ground
  The worms came squirming around
  Oh they danced until there legs were nearly lame
  Every little crawling creature you could name
  Everyone was glad
  What a time they had
  They were so happy they came
  Everyone was glad! What a time they had!
  They were so happy they came!
  Come on let's crawl
  Gotta crawl, gotta crawl
  To the ugly bug ball
  To the ball, to the ball
  And a happy time we'll have there
  One and all!
  At the ugly bug ball.
  Then our caterpillar saw a pretty queen
  She was beautiful in yellow, black and green
  He said, "Would you care to dance?"
  Their dancing led to romance.
  And she sat upon his caterpillar knees
  And he gave his caterpillar queen a squeeze
  Soon they'll honeymoon
  Build a big cocoon
  Thanks to the ugly bug ball
  Come on let's crawl
  Gotta crawl, gotta crawl,
  To the ugly bug ball
  To the ball, to the ball
  And a happy time we'll have there
  One and all!
  At the ugly bug ball!
  • Quentin Tarantino on media criticisms of animal exploitation in his movies.

• Sure, Kill Bill's a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.
  • Quentin Tarantino on media criticisms of violence in his movies.

• I am a genre lover – everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.
  • Talking Fiction (Rolling Stone, 2003)[1].

• Sure, and that's the cool thing about DVD: you can pack stuff on the disc that would've been too much for the big screen because actually it would've only interested yourself and a bunch of fanboys, who wanna know everything.
  • Talking Fiction (Rolling Stone, 2003)[2].

• To me, torture would be watching sports on television.
  • Playboy interview (November 1994 issue) [3].

• But can I tell the genuine-article Italian from the poseur Italian? No. To me they all seem like poseurs.
  • Playboy interview (November 1994 issue).

• The harshest censorship is self-censorship.
  • Cinema Speculation, pp. 118-119

• ...that fucking wasteland of a decade...
  • about the 1980s, in Cinema Speculation, p. 123

About Quentin Tarantino

• Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino also spoke briefly at the rally. "What am I doing here? I'm here because I am a human being with a conscience. And when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers." In response to Tarantino's comments branding some police murderers, police organizations in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, and elsewhere called for a boycott of Tarantino's films, and said they would refuse to provide security for his projects.
  • Amy Goodman Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2017) p 281, after Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss killed Amadou Diallo

• He is a person full of humanity. His scenes may seem a little dreadful, but try to do this: when you look at them, try to focus not on the murderer but on the victim. In the victim's eye you can see all the sensitivity of Tarantino.
  • Ennio Morricone
  • From: Cazzullo, Aldo (2016), Morricone: "Premiate le mie fatiche, ma non lavorerò più per la Rai", Corriere della Sera

• I think Disney were the first studio to realise that home video changed the nature of the films they were putting out. They weren’t doing it in a narrative sense, but they started layering the animation more and more, because they knew that kids would watch these films again and again. So, there’s also a visual density that comes in right about then – at the same time, Ridley Scott was making Blade Runner and stuffing the frame with all these different things; there’s too much to take in on one viewing. Then when Tarantino comes in in the early 90s, you start getting that same density in narrative. And a lot of that is because you can now own a film in the way you own a piece of music, you can control it in a way; it doesn’t just pass across you the way it does on television. That’s a big reason why, when I started in films with Following and Memento, it was still seen as radical or unusual not to tell the story chronologically, which has never been the case in literature. You go back to The Odyssey, it’s never been the case that you’re supposed to tell a story from beginning to end. That’s been the exception in every other narrative medium, it’s really only in movies that that was for a time demanded, and I don’t think it is any more.
  • Christopher Nolan, as quoted in Christopher Nolan: a showman's odyssey, by James Bell, 14 February 2024, Sight and Sound magazine, British Film Institute.

See also

• Category:Quentin Tarantino films