Many years ago, Quentin Tarantino‘s first trip to Sundance wasn‘t exactly a success. The young filmmaker was participating in a directors‘ workshop at the Sundance Institute -- the film trust founded by Robert Redford which also runs the Sundance Film Festival. Unfortunately, Tarantino‘s mentors were just not feeling his experimental approach. “It was just like, people are gonna either really like me or they‘re really not,” Tarantino says. Inappropriate humor A second visit to Sundance in 1992 proved more fruitful. His debut feature, “Reservoir Dogs,” a sassy, hyperviolent gangster movie, was the hit of the year. Despite the impact of his assured debut, Tarantino recalls being convinced he was going to get fired in the first two weeks of production. “I just thought it was too good to be true. I couldn‘t help but think something like ‚they don‘t let people like me make movies,‘” he says, laughing.
Follow-up movie “Pulp Fiction” was awarded the coveted Palm D‘Or at Cannes two years later, cementing his reputation as a moviemaker to be reckoned with. It was filled with the dark humor and bloody violence that would become known as Tarantino trademarks. The B-movie-obsessed director admits to getting a kick out of creating humor in inappropriate situations. “I‘m trying to get you to laugh at things you‘ve never laughed at before,” he explains. He cites his “bigtime” influences as movie brats like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, as well as Sergio Leone and Howard Hawks.
“I tend to think of myself as more of a novelist who makes movies than a director per se,” he declares. But he dismisses his apparent love of language as a product of writing for acting classes: “I started writing as an actor and it was all about dialogue and writing scenes to do.” Before moving into directing, Tarantino studied acting for six years and says learning to act for the camera gave him an insight into how directors put a movie together -- frame by frame. That was what really taught him how to write for the movies. “All of a sudden I started seeing film in a whole different way. When you start doing that, then it‘s only a few short steps until you start composing shots of your own,” he explains.
Tarantino has shown himself to be one of the most music-savvy directors of this generation with his use of songs like “Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection in the opening sequence of “Reservoir Dogs” and Nancy Sinatra‘s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” in “Kill Bill Vol. 1.” He, not immodestly, puts that skill down to his great music collection. “I have one of the best soundtrack collections in America,” he boasts.
That probably accounts for his determination never to use film composers: “I don‘t trust any composers to do it. I would just never give anybody that kind of responsibility,” he says and admits that his inner film buff enjoys the cornerstones of action cinema that some of his later movies have explored. “I love action scenes, but they are hard, and in a way that‘s what‘s fun about them,” he says.
In his latest movie, “Death Proof,” a homage to sleazy 70s Bmovies that stars Kurt Russell as a murderous stuntman, he puts his own spin on another of action film‘s fundamentals -- the car chase. All the tense stunts in “Death Proof” are real and he specifically cast a stuntwoman in one of the leading roles to achieve this. It may have been ambitious, but “Death Proof” got a critical mauling and didn‘t fare much better at the box office. But then Tarantino has long been resigned to people either loving or hating his movies.
