Tarantino's New York magazine interview

http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/quentin-tarantino-lane-brown-in-conversation.html

Worth sharing here. He seems to have a different idea about the current state of the industry than Spielberg and Lucas.

He is also quite honest about the cultural impact (far more limited) of his post-Pulp Fiction work.

It'll be interesting to see what happens down the line. At this point, I don't think Marvel is gonna have major blows. They've become too savvy with their marketing to fail, they're giving the masses what they want, for better or worse. It's other studios out there scrambling to get films with brand recognition going that I think will hurt the most like Sony, as the deal with MGM will be expiring after SPECTRE.

On an different note, I'll be going to his New Beverly Theater this Friday for a double feature of SUSPICION and NOTORIOUS.

Sorry, but a filmmaker that renounces John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles isn't to be taken seriously.

Ungrateful shit.

I'll see HATEFUL EIGHT for Jennifer Jason Leigh, though. Maybe it'll reboot her career.

For me, what HATEFUL EIGHT has going for it is a 70mm screening. I always like to take any opportunity of catching those, particularly ones actually shot in that format. Plus it has Kurt Russell.

Aside from those, there's not much else about that flick that interests me.

Control wrote:

Sorry, but a filmmaker that renounces John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles isn't to be taken seriously.

Ungrateful shit.

I'll see HATEFUL EIGHT for Jennifer Jason Leigh, though. Maybe it'll reboot her career.

I know he rejects Ford for his supposed racism, but why did he renounce Kubrick and Welles exactly?

It's interesting that he rejects Ford because he once took a role as an extra in a massive Hollywood production when he was a young man (truly irrefutable evidence of racism, regardless of the political content of later films like The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge) yet continues to admire William Friedkin despite Friedkin's apparent sympathy for The Birth of a Nation a century after the film was produced.

HJackson wrote:

It's interesting that he rejects Ford because he once took a role as an extra in a massive Hollywood production when he was a young man (truly irrefutable evidence of racism, regardless of the political content of later films like The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge) yet continues to admire William Friedkin despite Friedkin's apparent sympathy for The Birth of a Nation a century after the film was produced.

Friedkins appraisal of that film's politics is odd. Most people who admire the innovation and technical qualities of "Birth" would readily admit that it is racist by any modern POV.
On the other hand, I'm not really that interested in Friedkins historical interpretation.

I do like Kent Jones' essay regarding about Tarantino's apparent dismissal of Ford. http://www.filmcomment.com/article/intolerance-quentin-tarantino-john-ford/

Well I would agree with the notion that contemporary Howard Hawks was ultimately a much more interesting filmmaker, though obviously Ford's accomplishments in defining the medium should not be understated.

Salomé wrote:

Control wrote:

Sorry, but a filmmaker that renounces John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles isn't to be taken seriously.

Ungrateful shit.

I'll see HATEFUL EIGHT for Jennifer Jason Leigh, though. Maybe it'll reboot her career.

I know he rejects Ford for his supposed racism, but why did he renounce Kubrick and Welles exactly?

Your guess is as good as mine. Here's the interview, though:
https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU?t=8m41s

"Fuck those guys, they ain't so good. Ain't so hot."

Tarantino, love some of his movies, but he does remind me of a crazy IMDb message board poster at times. And I would think writer Jim Thompson would of been the more appropriate person to thank instead of Lionel White because while White wrote the book for The Killing from what I understand the final film is owed more to Thompson than White's source material which was changed significantly by Thompson and Kubrick. Hell he should thank him anyways because he took El Rey from Thompson's book The Getaway (the basis for the Peckinpah film) and put it in From Dusk till Dawn.

Here's the  Bret Easton Ellis/Tarantino podcast from a few years ago. Tarantino is wrong about a lot of things - Hitchcock and De Palma here - but his rants are certainly more entertaining than his films.



At the risk of being snobbish, the emptiness in all of Tarantino's films is down to a lack of basic education. Enthusiasm is a poor substitute.

I had most of that from being a film nerd as a kid, my difference was that I didn't care about genre dreck that he adores and focused on the classics. Not to mention that I didn't have access to any of them so all I could do was read about them in giant dusty old film texts that I had to do interlibrary loans for. The first time I got see any of these was usually waiting for the Movies Unlimited catalog and doing VHS mail order, late night TV airings after scanning the weekly newspaper listing and then when we finally got TCM in the late 90's it was like a new window into the world.
Kids today have it so easy. I remember splicing back together damaged VHS tapes from the mail. But doggone it I was going to finally see Potemkin!

He merely worked at a video store and watched thousands of VHS tapes...most of which were pan and scan.

Does this mean I can get a job somewhere?

Reservoir Dogs is such a piece of garbage. Not because it isn't very good, not because it doesn't have much story, not because it feels almost stagebound in its emptiness and staging-but because it unabashedly rips off the setup of the climax of the superior Hong Kong classic CITY ON FIRE. With no credit, no admission and no reprimand. I don't know hoe he got away with it, but it's so blatant that when you finally see COF you suddenly find yourself going...hey wait where have I heard this before...how in the hell....
The reason why Dogs has little story? It merely rips off the ending of the film and pads it out for a longer feature runtime. All the character buildup is excised. If he wanted to make a great film he should have done a full English remake and then applied his banter dialogue. But that wouldn't have made him such an early indie darling now would it?


I don't dislike the guy, I hate most of his films due to their lack of substance and for setting the craft back years. And the one time he made an adult good feature, it didn't do so well and we started getting the really stupid stuff with nothing but genre throwbacks.