Quentin Tarantino

• Reservoir Dogs

Pattern of success

• He had a partner at first: his manager / friend Lawrence, who seems to have also been trying to make it as an actor.
• They found a guy with minor success and money, who was hungry to work on another project
• They used that guy's name and money to jump-start interest from other people and raise more money.
• He took a dialogue style from a guy's books and brought it over to a different industry (film).
• He thinks a contribution was the joy of seeing old favorite actors again (eg Travolta) Source)

• Unknown Date - Tarantino on Blaxploitation
• This is a really interesting interview. Tarantino gives really great answers to questions.
• Undated - Quentin Tarantino - How I got out of Loserville
  • Summary: He decided to try to surround himself with people who were further along than he was to achieving his goal.
• 1992 - Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs
  • He gives a great explanation of how he got his start. I should really transcribe this at some point.

  • What is a reservoir dog? Well, a reservoir dog is Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and me! In a nutshell it's a story about a bunch of guys who plan a robbery and everything that go wrong, goes wrong.

    I worked in a video store in Manhattan Beach, CA. For many years, since I couldn't get anything sold as a writer, and couldn't get any money to direct any films. So that store was my one source of artistic expression. You know, buying the right films, recommending the films, I even used to have these little mini film festivals in the store because I had a few shelves that were mine, and every week I would do a new theme. I did my own little heist film section, and I remember looking at them all up on the shelf and I remember thinking to myself, "God, you know, they haven't done a heist film in a long time. I'd like to see one of those again. This is a really cool genre." And so that put the germ in my head, and so I wrote one.

    Harvey Keitel got involved in the movie by the fact that he had always been my favorite actor, you know ever since I'd seen him in Taxi Driver, and the Duelist, and Mother, Jugs & Speed, I'd always been a big fan of his, and it was a dream to be able to work with him sometime. Well my propducer, Lawrence ? is a good friend of mine, what happened was, he was taking an acting class, his acting teacher's wife is an actress who knows Harvey in the actor's studio, so Lawrence got the script to his acting teacher. His acting teacher read it and liked it and gave it to his wife. His wife read it and liked it and she put it in Harvey's hands at the actor's studio. Three days later Harvey calls me on the phone and says, "Hi, is this Quentin Tarantino? I'm Harvey Keitel. I want you to know I think this script is magnificent; it's absolutely magnificent and I'd like to be part of it. I really would. I'd like to even help produce it if I possibly could." And it was like, "PFFFTTTT" (spits out his coffee) "...This is Harvey Keitel??"

    He came aboard and helped us out...he lent his name to the film, which basically made me and Lawrence filmmakers as opposed to just a couple of knuckleheads just walking around with a script in our heads. We became legitimate; we'd walk into people's offices and say, "Well, you know we have Harvey Keitel attached." That didn't necessarily mean they were like, "Whoa, here's all the money you want." But they did take us seriously. We did come from somewhere. But also, Harvey went above and beyond what an actor would do, because, we were the casting the film, and we didn't have any money when we were casting, and me and Lawrence didn't have any money at ALL, and so what happened was Harvey goes, "You know, I think you guys really owe it to yourselves to go to New York and do a little bit of casting there are very fine actors out there and you're not going to see 'em just stayin' in LA." "Well, Harvey, that'd be really good but we can't afford to go..." "Well, I just can't stand this anymore. We're goin' to have to go to New York. And if I have to pay for it, I'll pay for it." And he flew us out to New York, he put us up in a hotel, he arranged with a casting director friend of his for a weekend of casting, and he paid all that out of his own pocket, just cuz he thought the film needed it. And from those New York casting sessions we got Steve Buscemi, who plays Mr. Pink.

    [The rest of the conversation is about casting / aesthetic decisions.]

    It's funny, a reporter or something will say, "We want to do a big in-depth story on Quentin. We want to just spend some time with him and have him do what he does during his day. What I do during my day is I go out to restaurants and I go to movies. That's what I do. And I hang out with my friends and stuff. I'm not into sports, I don't like sports, anything with a ball, no good. I'm not into sports, I'm not into cars, I mean, I'm into driving a car, but I'm not into, I don't collect cars or make model cars. I'm into movie stuff and horror stuff and like I said, hanging out with my friends and watching TV and messing around.

• 1994 - Quentin Tarantino Explains the Story of Pulp Fiction
  • the idea for all three stories was basically to take the oldest chestnuts that you've you've ever seen when it comes to crime stories; the oldest stories in the book (...)
    
    I'm using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry, so it seems even wilder because you've seen these stories a zillion times before but you've never seen them quite play out like this before. I think part of the trick is to take these movie characters, these genre characters, and these genre situations, and actually apply them to some of real life's rules and see how they unravel.
    
    The film has three leads in it. got Vincent who's the lead of the first story but who's the lead of the second story and Jules who's the lead of the is really the lead of the third story oh sorry did I break your concentration and and then like there's different characters to come in and support them like like for instance like a Vincent is kind of supporting Jules in the third story it got a small little part in the second story with Butch and Butch's get a small part in Vincent's story look there's something from in my from cloaca you know so they're like you know a you know trading bag you know trading back and forth but they're like the three paramount leads you know so like through the three leads and then everybody else in it the wolf Harvey Keitel's character Mia Wallace Fabien you know they're like these special guest stars that come running through the show and then the other characters, like Marcellus Wallace–who's like the big boss man who's in all three stories–they're kind of like the bedrock characters that tie all three stories together.
    
    When Pumpkin and Honey Bunny come in, it's their movie, and we don't know any different. They come on like they're the stars of the movie, and actually it's been that way with all the different actors in the film when I'm been working with them. When we work with Kim and Amanda it's like a full solid week of working with them and like you feel like that's their movie you know then they leave and you go, "Oh my god where did they go?" It's like. "how can I make the movie without them now?"
• 1994 - BBC - Quentin Tarantino: Hollywood's Boy Wonder
  • This is a really, really really useful documentary. There's a LOT of useful information.
  • 22 when he started at video archives
  • at 23 he decided to make a movie, called "my best friend's birthday"
  • he was shooting it over three years
  • "making a movie is the best film school that there ever is"
  • "SO I was like, 'well, I didn't know what I was doing in
  • Now ultimately I think making a movie is the best film school that there ever is, and so I'm like well I didn't know what I was doing at the beginning and now I know what I'm doing now, and I had the experience, and so now ok, but now I'm not going to make a movie like that anymore.
  • - he then wrote "true romance", with the specific idea of making it for ~1.3 million. So he had a pretty sophisticated understanding of how much money different films cost to make.
  • - He said for 2-3 years while he was trying to get true romance going he was told that it was two weeks from having the money necessary to get going.
  • - At a certain point he realized it wasn't going to happen because he was trying to get too much money when he hadn't done anything.
  • - So then he wrote "natural born killers" with the idea that he'd raise half a million for it.
  • - Another year and a half passes and he realizes no one is going to give him money to make a movie. By this time it looked like the script to true romance would sell. It looked like he was going to get the writer's guild minimum, so he'd have $30,000. So he said "I'll write a film to do for $30,000" 12 days, 16mm, black and white. By this time he had met Lawrence, and when Lawrence read the script he said "Hey you need to give me some time, I think I can raise some real money for this." A
  • 34:40 - The movie grossed $3 million in the US, cost 1.5 to make
  • - terry gilliam says he thinks the real breakthrough was that tarantino then went for a year onto the film festival circuit for a year, getting a ton of publicity.
  • - 36:20 - Tarantino says He thinks Tony Scott added a fairy-tale element to True Romance that Tarantino didn't intend
  • 40:10 - He really likes experimenting and doing things you're not used to seeing
  • 41:10 - He likes to try to make things funny that you're not used to seeing in a humorous light
  • at some point they're talking about sundance and they say that tarantino got a lot out of rehearsing the film's shots that way. That's directly comparable to hackathons at game-making companies where you make a quick-and-dirty version.
• 2013 - Quentin Tarantino talks about Django Unchained