I laugh all the time. I'm an easy laugher. You can find me on any set, because I'm always laughing.
When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid's private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. It's not my job. It's my calling.
I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.
In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.
And by banning [smartphones] from the set, the whole crew tends to work tighter with each other. And then it just becomes a thing where people kind of fall in love with the idea, 'This is the film-industry that I signed up for! This is really wonderful.' But then they go back to another set and everybody's on their cellphone, everyone's in their own little box, and they get depressed about it.
Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.
That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.
When I was on The View, Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back, 'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.'
Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.
When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads... I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.
It's nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.
If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.
Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.
Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.
You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me.
I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.
A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
You should be semi-embarrasse d about certain people seeing your movie.
If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.
If you're trying to drop ten pages from a screenplay, it hurts like hell, but if you just put it away for a month and then take it out, you can do it just like that!
To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band'... He is the great imaginer of our time. He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful.
Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.
I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.
As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.
I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.
Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
I love thinking about things subtextually and I actually - like for instance when I write, I actually, I'm not very analytical about it. I don't ever deal with the subtext because I just know it's there so I don't have to deal with it. I just keep it about the scenario. I keep it on the surface, on my concerns. And one of the fun things is is when I'm done with everything, like now, for instance.
You can't write poetry on the computer.
By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.
I am not going to tell you how I believe, but I do believe in God.
If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.
The children despise their parents until the age of when they suddenly become just like them - thus preserving the system.
I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.
If you love cinema as much as I do, and not many people do, and if you are focused and actually have something to offer, you will get somewhere with it.
Reservoir Dogs is a small film, and part of its charm was that it was a small film. I'd probably make it for $3 million now so I'd have more breathing room.
I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.
I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene just came to me.
The good ideas will survive.
Violence is fun, man.
My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.
I'm basically like, you know, learned pretty quickly the guy who throws the first punch usually wins, so when people gave me a hard time I just punched them.
Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It's just another colour to work with.
I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.
You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.
L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.
I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends. Paul Thomas Anderson is a genuine friend. Robert Rodriguez is a genuine friend. Rick Richard Linklater is a genuine friend. Eli Roth is a genuine friend. And so is Edgar Wright.
In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do.
To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male. And to me that's obvious. All right? So I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."
I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.
I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.
If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.
One can be inclined to just say, "F this political correctness! I don't have time for that!"
You always have to be keeping track, especially in this scenario [ The Hateful Eight], of where everybody is. They're pieces on a chess board.
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.
To me, torture would be watching sports on television.
You don't have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie.
I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
All my movies are achingly personal.
My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.
What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether.
I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.
There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.
I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.
Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.
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.
I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.
The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.
My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.
Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.
Between men and women, all the time there is tension. I feel it. A woman walks down the street, and I'm going back, and suddenly there is this tension. I just walk down the street, we were just on the way. And she thinks I'm a rapist. And now I feel guilty, even though I'm a damn poor did not.
I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.
I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.
You should be able to criticize civil servants for what you think is wrongdoing without being painted as a cop-hater. I don't feel the police are all corrupt, however I do feel they are suffering from institutional racism and there needs to be a top-to-bottom examination of the way they practice and the way they criminalize young black and brown males. The fact that they seem to have backed off from it seems to suggest they realize they overreacted on me and it looks bad.
It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.
Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but when you try to deal with prescient themes in the present, that is what you're doing.
I steal from every movie ever made.
I don't believe in putting in music as a band aid to get you over some rough parts or bad film making. If it's there it's got to add to it or take it to another level.
I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.
Spaghetti Westerns are really brutal and operatic with a surreal quality to the violence.
What the internet has done is destroy film criticism. I would never have guessed that the profession of film criticism would be going the way of the dodo bird.
It's my job to look at other people's humanity and it's my job to, 24/7, look at my life and listen to everything everyone says, watching their faces, the little idiosyncratic aspects of human beings - it's like a sponge, I take it in.
When I'm writing in my bedroom, in a bar, at my kitchen table or wherever, I'm conjuring it all up on the page. That's all well and good, but it is going to be a limited perspective at that point and time. Occasionally, what I write might read really well initially, but then you change your mind while hunting for locations when you discover settings which offer even better opportunities for drama or dramatic staging.
I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.
Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.
I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.
Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.
Sure, Kill Bill is 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.
I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you're not that good. You just reached the level here. I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.
CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives.
Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides By the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, Shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger Those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.
One thing I don't understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they'll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.
I don't have to play the song all the way to the very end - I use it while it's good and while it's cool and while it's exciting, and then I get out.
I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.
I didnt go to film school, i went to films
If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.
Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
To really get to know people and discover humanity, which is what I truly think writers and actors do, you've got to be interested in other human beings, you have to be interested in humanity in general, and you have to do some discovering of humanity and different people.
If the film is nominated for awards, and even if it wins them, it doesn't make the movie any better, just as if it's ignored that doesn't make the movie any worse.
Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.
Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.
I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.
If a Million People See My Movie, I Hope They See a Million Different Movies.
I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.
I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.
As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I'm severed.
The easiest way to kill a cult is to make that cult accessible.
When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.
The film [Django] really has a lot of ups and downs, and taps into a lot of different emotions. To me, the trick was balancing all those emotions, so that I could get you where I wanted you to be by the very end. I wanted the audience cheering in triumph at the end.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.
I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.
Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.
To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.
I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on.
When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.
There`s only one list that`s more illustrious than the list of directors who won the Palme d`Or. It`s the list of directors who didn`t.
A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough.
