Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.”

“Well, Quentin, it’s very violent. Not that I necessarily have a problem with that. But you wouldn’t understand what the story was about. So since you wouldn’t understand the context in which the violence was taking place, you would just be watching violence for violence’s sake. And that I don’t want you to do.”

I started figuring out, because of my mother, Reggie was trying to get in good with me. So, I asked him could I get a Coke and some candy at the snack bar. But instead of taking me to the concession stand, he just dug out his wallet, whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Get anything you want.” As far as I was concerned, mom could marry this cat.

To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972.

The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve’s success as a movie star can’t be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve.

The director has always confronted the audience with lead characters you’re drawn to despite on-screen evidence of their troubling nature, and deeds. Lead protagonists he makes it difficult to root for, but, ultimately, you root for them nonetheless. Which goes to prove what I’ve always believed, “It takes a magnificent filmmaker to thoroughly corrupt an audience.”

So, if you’re reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don’t recognize, congratulations, you’re learning something.

In the fifties you could claim that it was a repressed society that imposed restrictions on Hollywood, their movies, and their artists. But in the eighties the restrictions Hollywood imposed on their own product were self-imposed. The harshest censorship is self-censorship. And it doesn’t always come from the big bad studio either. Many filmmakers watered down their own vision right from the beginning.

I remember when I worked at my Manhattan Beach video store, Video Archives, and talked to the other employees about the types of movies I wanted to make, and the things I wanted to do inside of those movies. And I would use the example of the opening of Almodóvar’s Matador. And their response would be “Quentin, they won’t let you do that.” To which I replied back, “Who the fuck are ‘they’ to stop me? ‘They’ can go fuck themselves.”

Turan’s animosity towards my work has persisted throughout my career. To such a degree, when he finally responded positively to my film Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, he felt the need to explain to the readers the degree to which he had dismissed my work in the past (though by that time the only one keeping score was me). When you share an antagonism with one critic for as long as Kenny and me, you end up having a strange personal connection with each other.

In 1994 I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: “Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like.”

De Palma made it in partnership with his cowriter and producer Charles Hirsch. The way Richard Linklater’s Slacker authentically captured Austin Weird before the phrase was put on T-shirts and sold at the Austin airport, Greetings was a sixties film that played like hippie notes from the underground.

Also, it didn’t hurt that the three producers of the smash hit The Sting, Michael and Julia Phillips, and (superstar producer) Tony Bill, brought the material to Columbia. But what really encouraged Columbia Pictures to green-light Schrader’s screenplay (originally with Robert Mulligan at the helm), had nothing to do with its literary allusions to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, or its similarity to Arthur Bremer’s diary, but its cracked-mirror reflection of the Michael Winner-directed, Charles Bronson-starring, smash hit vigilante action drama Death Wish (as well as other revenge-based dramas, very popular at the time).

Once when Dan Rather was conducting an interview with me, I mentioned early in my career I got lucky. He scoffed at my use of the word “luck.” Declaring, “Some say, what you call ‘luck,’ is when opportunity meets preparation.” Well, I buy that definition (though I also do believe in Sidney Poitier’s definition of serendipity, “when Providence comes down and kisses you on both cheeks”).

Yet, Scorsese also told David Thompson, “I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence [in Taxi Driver]. Previously I’d been surprised by audience reaction to The Wild Bunch, which I saw in a Warner Brothers screening room with a friend and loved. But a week later I took some friends to see it in a theatre and it was as if the violence became an extension of the audience and vice versa.” “Shocked”? Really? You were “shocked”? So let’s get this straight, a Roger Corman alumnus, Martin “Boxcar Bertha” Scorsese, who came within an inch of directing I Escaped from Devil’s Island, directs one of the most kinetically charged violent climaxes in cinema history . . . and he was “shocked” that audiences were turned on by it?* No, he wasn’t. That’s just the kind of horseshit that a director would tell a David Thompson, or a Stephen Farber, or a Charles Champlin, or a Rex Reed, or a Rona Barrett and they’d let them get away with it.

No, like Peckinpah before him, Scorsese had to bend over backward to disingenuously describe those magnificent exhilarating violent scenes he crafted as horrifying.

Even Paul Schrader—in regard to Travis Bickle—slightly invests in this type of character Tom Foolery by suggesting Travis is a Vietnam veteran, and that he did a tour of duty during the war. Horseshit. No fucking way was Travis in Vietnam. The extent of Travis’ paranoia of black males is only credible if they are an other that he has only had superficial contact with. How do you do a tour of duty in Vietnam and only have superficial contact with black dudes? The answer is you can’t. Okay, say he did serve with black dudes in Vietnam, does that mean he has to like ’em? No, not necessarily. But it’s not convincing he would fear them the way Travis does. In the movie, he fears them as an other. If you serve in war with six or seven black guys (officers and enlisted men) they wouldn’t be an other (unless, possibly, if Travis was an MP).

Brian De Palma introduced me to Paul Schrader. We made a pilgrimage out to see Manny Farber, the critic, in San Diego. I wanted Paul to do a script of “The Gambler” by Dostoevsky for me. But Brian took Paul out for dinner, and they contrived it so I couldn’t find them. By the time I tracked them down, three hours later, they’d cooked up “Obsession.” But Brian told me that Paul had this script, “Taxi Driver,” that he didn’t want to do or couldn’t do at that time, and wondered if I’d be interested in reading it. So I read it and my friend [Sandy Weintraub] read it and she said it was fantastic: We agreed that this was the kind of picture we should be making. —Martin Scorsese in Scorsese On Scorsese

So much so that I sought him out at nineteen to interview him. How did I manage that? Simple—if not easy—I looked up every John Flynn in the phone book, called them up and asked, “Is this John Flynn?” If they said yes, then I asked them, “The John Flynn who directed Rolling Thunder?” Till eventually one said, “Yes it is, who is this?” Wow! It’s him, it’s fucking him!

By the final page Schrader’s point is made clear. A point nobody at Fox wanted to make (everybody who talks about the freedom of cinema in the seventies should talk to Paul Schrader). So Schrader’s savage critique of fascist Revengeamatic flicks was turned by its makers into a savage fascist Revengeamatic. Yet . . . the greatest savage, fascist, Revengeamatic flick ever made. Which frustrates Schrader to this day.

But I still blame Schrader. I blame him for giving the same spineless excuse a lot of directors of fiascos claim after the fact, the big bad studio made me. As if they couldn’t say no. Well, then they wouldn’t have made it. Good. Who wants to spend three months making a fucked-up version of their movie? Then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for it, or cringing whenever they watch it, like Schrader does on the DVD commentary?

As soon as the movie begins—right off the bat—it starts with a shot of a tentative Roberta Collins, shot through the V frame of Buck’s Levi clad pant legs, as he says off-screen: “My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck.” Floyd turned to me and asked incredulously, “What did he say?” I repeated, “My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck.” At the repeating of that line, Floyd burst out laughing. And when Floyd got the giggles it was impossible not to laugh with him. So the two of us started laughing. And then, right at the beginning of the movie, we got into the single biggest case of the giggles I ever fell into during a movie.

At the world premiere of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, Gael García Bernal told me the same thing happened to him and Diego Luna when Brad Pitt said the line in the Musso and Frank parking lot, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” He said they laughed so hard and so long, Gael’s girlfriend started getting mad at them.

“Don’t be so quick to make judgments about people stuck in situations you can never understand. I got no problem with Stepin Fetchit. Those were the only roles he could get, so he did ’em. And by doing those roles became the wealthiest black man in America. Fuck those motherfuckers say he shuffled. Yeah, he shuffled his black ass all the way to the motherfuckin’ bank!”

But even more influential than any one script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. The reason I knew how to even format a screenplay was from reading Floyd’s screenplays. It would be a long road—from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay—True Romance—in September 1987. But due to Floyd’s inspiration I tried writing screenplays.

I don’t know how he died, where he died, or where he’s buried. But I do know I should’ve thanked him.