Price: $38.00 - $21.99
(as of Oct 03,2024 17:45:00 UTC – Details)
From the Publisher
‘I DIDN’T GO TO FILM SCHOOL, I WENT TO FILMS.’
Why is Quentin Quentin? The answer is both simple and telling. Late in her pregnancy, Connie Tarantino – henceforth the redoubtable ‘Connie’ – became hooked on the Western serial ‘Gunsmoke’, featuring a young Burt Reynolds as Quint Asper, the half-Comanche blacksmith who appeared for three seasons. Connie is half Cherokee, a fact which would contribute an aura of mystery to her extraordinary son. Something she dismissed as ‘sensationalism’.
Reservoir Dogs
‘It’s a low budget movie,’ he promised, ‘because it all takes place in one garage where all these guys who pull a heist come back to, and you know something has gone badly wrong. But you never see the heist.’ That was key – the whole film was all about the aftermath.
Pulp Fiction
‘Everything I have written,’ he confessed, ‘has at least twenty pages that are taken from other things I’ve done.’ The plan was an anthology movie like Mario Bava’s 1963 horror triptych Black Sabbath, but inspired by Tarantino’s love of old crime magazines like Black Mask. The legendary periodical was home to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and more modern, hardboiled writers like Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson – who once qualified as pulp but had crashed the literary party, just as he had duped the bouncers of the arthouse scene.
Jackie Brown
He would re-embrace the milieu of Pulp Fiction, but make a film in striking contrast to its cool playfulness. His adaptation, now retitled Jackie Brown, would run chronologically, A to B to C. To Tarantino’s zigzagging sensibility this was a radical subversion of the norm. ‘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.’ If his previous film had been an opera, this was a chamber piece. He already had a readymade subgenre for what he had in mind: this was a ‘hang out’ movie. ‘I made Jackie Brown like the way I always felt about [Howard Hawks’] Rio Bravo, which is a movie I can watch every couple of years.’ Once you get the storyline out of the way, you simply enjoy ‘hanging out’ with the characters.
Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2
For his comeback, he planned to make the loudest, craziest, most reverential and least realistic film possible. The Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino, as it was flamboyantly billed, would double down on what we had come to know as Tarantinoesque. In short, he was about to try his hand at an action movie. Not in any mainstream Hollywood sense, but as a tribute to the myriad of martial arts films that sprang out of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and China. Films like the Sonny Chiba double-bill that Clarence savours in a rundown cinema at the beginning of True Romance. It would be blood-soaked like never before and bound around the globe.
Inglourious Basterds
Back in the Video Archives days, whenever the gang got talking about their favourite World War II men-on-a mission movies – a classic subgenre including such luminaries as The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone, but, as Quentin Tarantino would keenly point out, also including an entire regiment of neglected gems – they would refer to them under the catch-all term of Inglorious Bastards movies.
Django Unchained
Spaghettis, with their co-option of samurai mythology, are big in Japan. Tarantino spent his day off listening to the scores, and an opening scene took shape in his imagination. In a rare instance caught without his notebooks, he began scribbling it down on hotel stationery before it got away.
The Hateful Eight
As modern audiences happily streamed movies, his movies, on their laptops and phones, The Hateful Eight was an emphatic reassertion of the cinematic. The idea of films being shrunk onto screens the size of a cigarette packet depressed him. It is no surprise to hear that he is a zealot for vinyl. He still writes his scripts by hand. ‘You don’t need technology for poetry,’ he sneered. With a touch of poetic contrariness, with the exception of the breathtaking vistas of the opening chapter, his great 70mm extravaganza was set in a single, ramshackle room. And this was another Western.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
Where would his muse venture next? The answer was literally to Hollywood. But this was a Hollywood born in the mind of Quentin Tarantino, a vivid and brilliant fusion of life and art, and his most personal film.
Publisher : White Lion Publishing (October 1, 2019)
Language : English
Hardcover : 176 pages
ISBN-10 : 1781317755
ISBN-13 : 978-1781317754
Item Weight : 2 pounds
Dimensions : 8.75 x 1.2 x 10.1 inches