In late November 2019, Quentin Tarantino was hard at work in a room at The Parisian. He came to Paris for a special cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and will also make a small trip to Europe to help with the film's release. But now, he has started his next task - to write a novel. The writing material was on the table in front of him, and his notebook lay quietly beside a stack of books, full of his handwriting.
Of course, Quentin has other plans for the future. Especially his next and possibly the last. He recently brought up his thoughts about Kill Bill 3, and he hasn't made a decision on the Star Trek movie yet. And some of his latest news: he's going to be a father soon.
For now, looking back on 2019, Quentin is satisfied. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a huge success, with the non-series R-rated film grossing more than $370 million worldwide and sparking buzz. Perhaps only the work known as "Quentin's ninth film" can be so popular. The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, received various accolades, and became the favorite to compete for the Oscars.
But Quentin knew that the film's release was in a very different setting from the 1992 premiere of his directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, at the Sundance Film Festival. He's still making movies on his own terms, but in the 90-minute interview, he admits that others aren't as lucky as he is. If "Reservoir Dogs" can still be released in the current film market environment, Quentin himself is not sure.
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" work photo
Hollywood News Frontline
Let's start with the ending. In the climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Cliff and Rick save the day, Sharon Tate invites Rick home for a drink, and the film ends with camera footage rising from the house and Zerro Boulevard. Those people all survived that night, and this fantasy world was over. For you, the end shot has always been crucial, right?
Quentin Tarantino
Of course, it's critical. I had this ending in mind a few years ago. It took me about seven years to polish this ending bit by bit. My initial idea was formed one day after the filming of the movie "Death Certificate". About five years ago, I came up with the idea for this ending shot. Frankly, I was shocked when I did. But that's what I had to do in those days, I had to shoot it. It's weird, almost never happened – for five years, everywhere I went, I kept thinking about a certain shot. The footage we captured was the one that has always been in my mind.
Isn't it hard to shoot exactly the exact shot you envisioned?
Actually, shooting is not difficult. The difficulty is finding a suitable house for filming. The door of the house had to be exactly where I had it in mind, and the camera had to go through the trees. I even wrote in the script: "It goes through the bushes. "You have to do that when you shoot, and then you see the parking lot and the gates of the house. I even wish I could have captured a small clump of twigs in this shot. In addition to this, it was also difficult to get Rick's home right next door to this house. None of the scenarios we've seen before meet this condition. I can't do everything, but I want to try to get as back to what I have in my head and find a house that's suitable for the shoot. Finding this house were my photographer Bob Richardson and my first assistant director, Bill Clark. At the end of the day, they opened Google Maps and started driving over the Hollywood Hills, and that's how we found the two houses. There weren't any location crews in the car. They rang the doorbell and asked, "Can we go in and see your house?" The people inside said yes, and we looked at it and said, "That's it, that's it." "The other house was about to be sold, so there was no one living in it, and there was no problem using it. So, Bob and Bill knew what I really wanted. This shot is the end of the movie, and I've been thinking about it for a long time. It was probably the fifth or sixth week of filming, and we finished that shot, which was a very early part of the shoot.
How long did it take you to shoot the whole thing?
I don't remember anymore. It's about three and a half months. So, we did that shot very quickly, probably week five or six, which was a bit frustrating. It feels like ...... It's over, so what's there to shoot after that? (laughs)
The film introduces Sharon Tate in a bit of a twist – a vision of her good and all the hopes she has for life, which is both striking and mixed. We can only face reality: she was stolen in her own life, and in the lives of all of us.
yes, I think part of the reason (and also always in my mind) is that, apart from Jay Seblin, when we saw the victims of that night come out, like we always look at them from behind, they were like figurines, like they were cut out of Sharon. I didn't think something strange would happen to me, not just Sharon, but that little dressing gown that Abigail Folger was wearing. Her little blue dressing gown was a sign to me, and every time Abi walked out of the house in that blue loungewear, I was fascinated.
I have two ideas about the origins of this movie. One is the story of Rick and Cliff, a hard-working actor and his royal stuntman, and the other is Sharon Tate, the summer of 1969 and the Manson family. When these ideas collide with each other, is there a moment of inspiration?
When I first thought of the character of Cliff, I quickly thought, what if they lived on Zerro Avenue as well, what if they lived next door to Roman and Sharon, and once I really started thinking about it as a full-fledged story, things were so much easier. In fact, it's the first thing that has come to my mind since I had this story. Although I thought about what might have happened, it was very early to put it all together. I started thinking about the relationship between Rick and Cliff because I met an older actor on the set of a movie. He came up to me and said, "Look, I've got a guy here, a stuntman. He's been my stuntman for about a decade. I'm not hitting him, because he really doesn't have much to do, remember that prank scene that was going to be shot on Thursday? It would be nice if we could give him this task. I said, "No problem." ”
When did this happen?
About eight or nine years ago. So, this guy walks over, and you can tell at a glance that he used to be the perfect stand-in for this actor, but you can also see that it is history. This guy doesn't work for me, he works for that actor, which is also funny. He's also an interesting guy. I remember one day I was sitting on the set and looking at them opposite: the stuntman was working, and the old actor was sitting in the director's chair in the same costume, right next to him. They're just sitting there, but I'm sure they've been chitping like this for years. It dawned on me: this is an interesting relationship. It's a relationship I've never seen that adapted into a screenplay. I thought it would be very interesting if I were to make a film about Hollywood, revealing the secrets of that relationship.
It must be something like that you've read or know before.
Frankly, I've never thought about this before. I just thought about a certain cinematographer who likes to work with his camera assistant, or a director who talks to his assistant director about everything, and they've been working together for a long time. I know similar things, and I also think that there are fewer such things now than they used to be. Bert Reynolds and Hal Needham, and Steve McQueen and Bud Eakins, I knew that, but I had never seriously considered it before.
Now it seems that this is fertile ground worthy of reclamation by the director.
It's obvious. But why has no one ever done that? There are so many stories like this. The fact of their entire relationship is that they are both good friends and have an employment relationship. The stuntman is hired and he is paid to do all the things that an actor is supposed to do, but he is really risking his life. Moreover, there are people who pay stuntmen to be friends with them, and there are people who pay stuntmen to go to the set and talk to them, help them solve problems, or talk to them on their own lines.
Maybe it can also help you stay out of trouble.
That's right. Especially when drunk, many actors have similar troubles. So, while it feels like everything is taken for granted when talking about it now, at the time of the film's creation, it was purely a flash of inspiration.
It's a sad relationship: not that Cliff has been following the destitute Rick, but that their journey is over, and the Hollywood playground continues. Your work shows a lot of sadness, especially Dangerous Liaisons. But you don't seem to be a sad person, where does this sadness come from?
Yes, I'm not a sad person. Life is good. I've had a good life since I came to Hollywood, so I really have no reason to be sad. Actually, here's the thing, if I hadn't put Sharon in the whole story, the film probably wouldn't be so sad. I don't know what this story would have become if you hadn't put Sharon in the whole story, but as long as you put her in, you know that you are getting closer and closer to the day Sharon was killed, and even if the movie stopped in February, even if it didn't appear in the movie in August, you knew that August was coming. This in itself makes the film even more thought-provoking, especially with no real story. So, like I said, while doing other work, it took me about four years to figure out who Rick and Cliff really were. He also spent a small part of his energy researching the Sharon and Manson families, mainly figuring out who Rick and Cliff were. Figuring out some of this would have pretty much written an entire book about Rick. First of all, I want to know about his career, his film and television productions, and every TV show. I need to know all this clearly. And then I had to go beyond it, so I wasn't going to just cram that into the film. Some might say that I did it before, but I did have to go beyond it at the time. My way to do it is to write them all down. I'm fed up with Marvin's scene, which is Al Pacino's scene (1). Whenever I try to figure out where Rick is, I repeat Marven's scene. These never appear in the film, but it's a good way to get Marvin to ask Rick questions. By the time I finished writing these, it was already as thick as a novel. But it never appears in the film, just to get to know Rick. And then I already know who these characters are, and the question becomes: what kind of story do I want to tell? Now it's up to me. Earlier, I had some ideas, and that was more like Elmer Leonard's story. These people are like Elmer Leonard's characters, only older. You can imagine that this is a character in one of his novels. But then I thought, I don't need a story. I feel that the character itself is sufficient. I could shoot Rick's day, Cliff's day, Sharon a day, and then I just had to follow them in February. I think the characters are strong enough and the atmosphere I've created is strong enough.
You mentioned earlier that the audience knows what to expect in August no matter what. Perhaps that's where the grief comes from, because we know we're about to see the famous murder that happened in Hollywood. Or at least, we'll think so.
Yes. The morbid thing about this thing is that once I realized that it could be a certain day of my life and started writing the story, the murder as we know it becomes like an engine that drives the plot forward. I don't know if you feel that way on the first day of August, but once you get to the second day of August, it seems like every scene brings you closer and closer to August 8th. It's pathological that real-life murders are pushing the characters in my story forward. It's not that I'm unaware of this, I'm already aware of it when I'm creating. I kept asking myself, "Am I trying to do a good job? If I don't do a good job, it's really tasteless." "Normally, I don't mind being tasteless, but this time I do, I don't want to take advantage of these victims. I don't think I'm taking advantage of them, but I have to keep asking myself if I've done it.
The mixed ending reflects the optimism of the film. Yes, we know what happened at midnight between August 8 and 9, 1969, but the film shows a hopeful "what if". What if that moment became eternal?
I wasn't really mentally prepared for that ending to be presented in the language of the camera. When I was writing the story, I only had one thought in my head, like "Great, she's saved, it's done." But in the film, when I see it all together, it's just "Okay, she's saved......" and it's because of that string of ellipses that one has to realize that she's not actually saved, and the truth doesn't go the way it does in the film. To be honest, in the past five years, when I imagined that scene in my head, I never thought that she was not saved in the end. When the film is finished, we have to accept such a regrettable reality.
Stills from "Django Unchained".
Let's go back to the scene you said earlier about Marvin and how you wrote about these conversations. When I was on the set of Django Unchained, someone gave me a script with a lot more material than the final release. Then you talked about how you treat the script as a novel, how you can revise it as the plot progresses. There's some footage in it that you never plan to make. In that film, I remember a whole set of shots of Bronchilda, and a scene from a slave auction.
Oh, yes. Blonshida has a whole story, and we didn't even shoot it because there was so much material.
Is this for readers who will read the script in the future?
Yes, it was fun, and for a while we thought we would shoot it. Although I can't think of how to make a movie that contains these 20-25 minutes and is worth watching in the cinema, I will write this paragraph into the script for the sake of readers who want to read the script. We've even tried casting and occasionally thought about how to shoot it, but I still write into the script things that don't have a chance to see the light of day, because the script will read better even if I don't shoot those shots. Doing so will flesh out the script and enhance the reading experience of the script. But then, a lot of things come up that I'm not sure about. It may be possible to shoot some of the scenes that appear in the script, but many more scenes can't. I can almost guess what 80% of the finished piece is, but I can't guess the remaining 20%. You'll always feel like there's a lot of surprises. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there were a couple of clips that I bet would be in the finished film, but they didn't, and even the ones that were the soul of the movie for me, at least at the time of filming, were also deleted.
Can you tell me what the deleted soul fragment is?
The little girl, Julia Butters, was supposed to have more scenes. She later appeared a few more times. In the third act in August, the narration begins to give background to why Rick can't afford Cliff's salary anymore, so Rick has to let Cliff go. Tom Rothman (2) had been reading the script and he called me and said, "Hey, Quentin, the narrator says Rick had to let Cliff out...... This should be a part of the movie. It shouldn't be a narration, it should be performed. "Believe it or not, as soon as the movie is finished, Tom Rothman will let me add scenes. "I think you should write this out and make it a rivalry between the two," he said. So, I just did it. The day before the shoot, I remember that I had even given Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio a handwritten script, so they only had a handwritten script, not a printed copy. But when they finished reading it, they said, "Okay, let's get started, let's start filming this." "We did it in a hurry, and they probably didn't think it was going to be in the film, but it was very good and very important. It's a heartbreaking process. It's a bit masochistic and heartbreaking to write about something you really like but almost never photograph. But at the same time, it's nice to be able to shoot a part of it and to be able to shoot it out of our footage. My films have a lot of material, and part of making a film is sifting through it. So, I'm not just going to write a normal script and then shoot it, and the whole script is done. Each of my films can be seen as an adaptation of a novel. By the way, there's a reason why people use scripts as blueprints for filming. I'm always joking about it, but they do it for good reason, and most of them do. They're not as ridiculous as I am.
Stills from "The Hateful Eight".
Leaving aside the screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the Cannes International Film Festival, I'm curious to see what you'd do with the film's footage on other occasions. The example of "The Hateful Eight" coming on Netflix as a miniseries made me wonder if one day you would ever recreate the best of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
To me, the Hateful Eight version of Netflix is no different from the previous version. The Hateful Eight is a lengthy movie, and in my opinion, it's more of a play. Although I haven't been to the theater in a long time, I know that the play there lasts at least three hours. This is also the standard of real drama. So, I took it for granted that the film was a play, especially since I included an intermission in the film.
But it's a type of shift.
It's a type of shift. So, I had to fine-tune the existing chapters to fit the new miniseries genre, but in a way, they already already had chapters that matched the miniseries. The opportunity for the launch of "The Hateful Eight" was that Netflix gave me this choice. It's the same with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, if someone gives me that opportunity and is willing to fund it, and I have all the material and I can do it, then if I like it, I'll do it. I think it's interesting to look at the film in that way.
All of your recent films have been big-budget films. What keeps you focused, and what keeps you passionate about making and distributing a film of this magnitude?
Directing something boring about a feature film, or something minimalist, might not be that appealing to me. I think most of my work is very, very funny, with laughter. Sometimes I call them comedies, sometimes I don't, but even if they're not comedies, they spark as much laughter as any comedy released in the same year, if not more. I hear laughter all the time when I'm writing the script, it's like that, it's like that, I'm going to hear the audience's reaction. The audience doesn't just sit there with blank eyes. I used to sit in the cinema and test the audience's reaction, watching them chuckle at one line or another. First laughing, then nervous as Cliff travels to Span Farm. And then all of a sudden, the cinema was quiet, you know what I mean? That's the reward, that's the reward.
It seems that after great success in the career, it becomes easy to shoot a new movie. You don't have to work as hard as you used to.
I do feel like I'm getting a little tired of doing the same thing now than I did when I was a fledgling in the 90s. However, the joy and pleasure of making films, and seeing so many people who could do other things pay to watch my movies on the screen...... It's also very exciting.
You started making films in the early 90s of the 20th century, when independent cinema was booming. For the fledgling, it was a time of abundance and perhaps more optimism.
Yes, I've always thought that if I'm going to get into the film industry, I'm going to go into the independent film world, but I'm going to break into the late '80s before the advent of orthodox independent cinema in the '90s. At the end of the 80s, three or four independent films broke out every year and made a name for themselves. Even if the film only runs for a week or two at one of Santa Monica's Lemle theaters, a small ad in the Los Angeles Times, and a review of the film in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Los Angeles Weekly, it is enough. When we attended the Sundance International Film Festival in 1992, none of us could have predicted that many of the films that premiered at the festival would become the forerunners of the rise of the entire independent film movement. Most of the films we made would be released the following year, and even films that were rejected at the Sundance International Film Festival, such as "The Law of Gravity," ended up being released. With the rise of alternative music at the time, so did independent films, which became loyal partners.
How do you see the current film environment? You're a person who makes films on film. I can't even imagine how a budding director can raise enough money to make a 35mm film and bring it to the screen.
Well, some people are. It's a fallacy that it costs less to shoot digital films. You'll spend money in many places, so you can spend money to buy film and make film films. I think the sad thing is that a lot of filmmakers don't care about using film these days. Digital cinema will make them happy because then not only will the photographer be able to master the shot, but they will also be able to master it. They are most comfortable making digital films with mobile phones and small film lenses (note: one of the ways to make digital films is to digitize the footage captured by a film camera). They might be making a film with a lot of worries, "How are we going to get a good shot, is it going to get worse if we don't have enough light?" The independent film market of yesteryear no longer exists. The '90s boom is gone, and it's not even as good as it was in the late '80s, when maybe your movie was only in theaters for a week or two, but it at least had a foothold, and it would always have a place in the newspapers, and it would be shown at the Los Felice Second Theater or the Concert Hall Theater or even some miniature theater in the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. A lot of the movies I've seen have only been shown in Cinema No. 6 or somewhere in the Beverly Center.
You can't even show a movie at Beverly Center anymore because that theater no longer exists.
Yes, but that movie was shown in that theater, and that advertisement in the newspaper was a small piece of my territory. You see little posters, little headlines, it's like saying, "I'm right here!," but right now, a newspaper ad is nothing. Now, movies can easily be hidden in the world. It's strange that there are still people making movies that can't be released. Every Friday when you read the Los Angeles Times, you'll see a new big comedy or, if you count movie reviews, two other films that take up the entire front page, and then you flip the pages before you see the TV show list and you see seven or eight short reviews of movies I've never heard of. Sometimes the lead actor is still a celebrity. I've never heard of these videos, there are no ads, and I don't know where they come from. What are these movies? Where are they going? I felt that way even seven or eight years ago. At that time, I was a jury member at the Sundance International Film Festival, so I watched all the films that were screened at the festival. I watched "Frozen River" because it won an award, and I watched "Sandbag" and the film won something and it ended up in theaters. There was also a film, but I can't remember the name now. The film takes place in the '90s, and Ben Kingsley plays a character who smokes marijuana.
Oh, it's the movie "The Weird Factor".
That's right, it's Weird Factor. This one was screened at the time, along with a number of other films. In the '90s, it was amazing to be part of the Sundance International Film Festival, it was like a holy grail. Seven or eight years ago, when I was a jury, we watched all the films at the Sundance International Film Festival, the premier independent film festival in the United States. There were famous characters like Winona Ryder and Paul Giamathi in the films, and I never heard of them again. Not even on cable TV. I thought, well, maybe they're going to be on Channel 4 of the Entertainment Time TV network, but it turns out that I never see them again. They were never released in theaters, and they literally fulfilled the goal of 90s independent films, which was to express the director's personal thoughts rather than pursue box office success. And so they just disappeared.
Is it a backward idea to want movies to make it to theaters, rather than just appearing on streaming video platforms and then disappearing?
Streaming video platforms are one thing, but I don't think the movies I'm talking about, I don't think they'll show up on streaming video platforms. When you read these short reviews, it may seem like the critics are quite dismissive of them, but they actually tell interesting stories or present an interesting genre of films. You might think, maybe these critics don't like it, but it sounds like a cool movie. Maybe I won't see it in San Gabriel this week, but I'll watch it when it's on cable. But I never saw it on cable again, which was a movie in theaters.
Stills from "Reservoir Dogs".
If everything were to start all over again, 29-year-old Quentin Tarantino would start his career tomorrow with the film "Reservoir Dogs", do you think the film would be a big success?
I've thought about this question over and over again. I think the film itself is good, but I think the key to its success lies in Tim Ross and Michael Madsen. If I had such a talented actor right now, I think it would be a big success. I can foresee Reservoir Dogs going to be picked up by a small film production company or something. I'm optimistic. But I also thought that the market that existed at that time, the market that provided me with a platform and opened my wings to protect me from creating films, no longer exists. "Reservoir Dogs" emulated the movie "Blood Labyrinth" as much as possible, and at that time I especially wanted "Reservoir Dogs" to stand out and be a big success like "Blood Labyrinth", which was my starting point. I don't know if I'll get a review like "Blood Labyrinth," but I remember the news and I remember driving to Beverly Center to see it. It's an independent film, but it's also a genre film, and it has a unique way of shooting this type of film. That's what I want to emulate, the approach that the Coen brothers used in Blood Labyrinth.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sparked thousands of buzz about the release, but many seemed to carelessly ignore the context you present (in the movie). But it was also the big movie event of the year. It's comforting to see this film become a phenomenon in a world filled with superhero movies and series, right?
It feels great. I think a lot of us filmmakers are facing a dark night of the soul, risking the obscurity of the film. I know that a lot of filmmakers are like that, we've been one with the film for a long time, and it's been going on for a long time. I don't know what it's going to be like in 15 years, but I don't think we're going to stick with it. What's more, when we stop insisting, movies become platforms that simply provide people with what they want to see. In this way, is cinema still influential? Does it matter? Is it part of everyday communication? Cinema was the darling of the times, and it is all I have. A film will be very popular, become a hot topic, be hotly discussed by public opinion, and it will constitute a kind of dialogue. Some films didn't understand them well when they were released in theaters, and they weren't very successful at the box office. But five years from now, when movies come live on cable or anywhere else, they may still be a success because everyone has seen them and talked about them. They became part of society. So, the question of whether movies still have an impact is a big question, and it's been hotly discussed in publications, coffee shops, and podcasts. It's all frustrating, but you're not frustrated when you're creating the film, because everything shows that you're part of the discussion. There's no denying that within a month of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood being released in theaters, everyone was talking about it. It's in everyday communication. It took me a long time to realize that many of the negative reviews that come with the movie are actually pleasant. I didn't think so, and I'm going to be very angry about it. But now, while I still think a lot of these ideas are incredibly extreme in many ways, they don't hurt me. They just helped me. They energized public opinion and created controversy for films. Frankly, perhaps controversy is more important than dialogue. If you want to cause controversy, someone has to be the opposite. Maybe I think they're hateful, or maybe some critics are extreme, but they're helping me in their own way because it's worth arguing. For me, reading all the reviews about the film is not a pain. Because for me, some of the points in them are interesting and deserve to be brought out for discussion. Some of the views speak for themselves, and their extremism is so bare that they are exposed.
Guo Yi is a lecturer at the School of Journalism, Chongqing University
*This article is a slightly abridged translation of an interview with Quentin Tarantino published on December 18, 2019 by Deadline, an American electronic magazine.
(1) Translation: Al Pacino plays Rick's agent Marvin.
(2) Translation: Chairman of Sony Pictures.