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

1994

• 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

• To me, torture would be watching sports on television.
  • Playboy interview (November 1994 issue) [1].

• 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).

2003

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

• 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.
  Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment.
  • 6 October 2003 BBC interview

• I don’t consider him a rapist.
  He didn’t rape a 13-year-old, it was statutory rape, all right?
  That’s not quite the same thing, all right?
  That’s statutory rape, you know, he had sex with a, with a minor, all right? That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape …
  … You’re talking about violent, throwing them down, it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world.
  You can’t throw, you know, throwing the word rape around is like throwing the word racist around, all right?
  You know, it just doesn’t apply to everything that people use it for, all right?
  You know, he was, he’s guilty of having sex with a minor.
  She wanted to have it, and dated … dated, dated the guy …
  … and found out—well, yeah, by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, we’re not talking about the morals in Europe and everything, all right?
  Look. She was down with it.
  And she’s talked about it, she’s talked about it. Now, now that she’s an adult.
  I’m, I’m right. She’s talked about it since, about, “No, he didn’t really do anything to me, it was a technicality from being 13.”
  The transcripts are like, now she’s trying to take care of her mom, who’s pissed off at her, so now she’s saying this, she’s saying that, now that she’s an adult—
  her mom is now on her, she has to say, “He did this, he did that.” Now that she’s an adult, she’s got a whole different story.
  Now, if you were going to really do equal time, you’d have his book, Roman by Polanski, and read his chapter about what he says happens, all right?
  the situation was not that she was against all this. She was down to party with Roman. And they partied.
  let’s talk about it the way it is. She was down with a party. He was down with a party
  we’re not talking about rape anymore, or we’re not talking about doing it against her will
  it’s just, it’s a minor situation …
  … it’s a situation that she’s a minor.
  Is it against the law? You’re right.
  in this book, though, do you know what happened?
  In his book, he talks about why he slipped.
  I have a little bit of information on this, all right, as opposed to just popping off on this and that and the other.
  Look, okay, I don’t believe that’s rape, I believe it’s against the law, all right?
  I don’t believe it’s rape. I mean, not at 13. Not for these 13-year-old party girls.
  • 19 November 2003 interview with Gary Garver and Howard Stern regarding Roman Polanski, transcription supplied 6 February 2018 here by Marissa Martinelli of Slate in response to audio posted here by Madeleine Davis of Jezebel

• I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.
  • 25 December 2003 Virgin.Net interview archived here

2009

• I look at Death Proof and realize I had too much time.
  • 18 May 2009 Q&A at hollywoodreporter.com

• 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!
  • 13 August 2009 Interview with The London Paper about Inglourious Basterds archived here

2022

• 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

year unknown

• 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.

• 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.

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