Quentin Tarantino Quotes

I think it almost all has to do with coming at writing from an acting perspective, because I didn't, like, study writing. I studied acting.

I cannot get myself interested in video games. I've been given video game players and they just sit there connected to my TVs gathering dust until eventually I unplug them so I can put in another special-region DVD player.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

American Indians would, you know, scalp them and desecrate the bodies, you know, tie them to cactuses or bury them in anthills or things like that, and you know, cut up the bodies and stuff. And then the other enemy soldiers would come across and find their comrades laying there, ripped apart, and they would be sickened by it and it would scare them.

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.

And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.

Oddly enough, most of the books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to invade Poland. You know, there'd be movies where there would be some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or something.

You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male. And to me that's obvious. All right? So I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."

I didn't want my script to get too out of control like that. So I actually made it a point not to do stuff like that, to pretty - to keep it more sparse than it's been in the last few years, or the last decade.

It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back.

There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.

Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

Oddly enough, I've always - I've never actually seen "The Alamo" itself, actually. So I don't really have the association of "Green Leaves of Summer" as being "The Alamo" theme. Oddly enough, I grew up watching kung fu movies. They would use the theme "Green Leaves of Summer" in a lot of needle drops in kung fu movies a lot. So I was actually more familiar with it in a Bruce Li movie than I was actually from the John Wayne film.

I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

You don't have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie.

I cut the scene out, but there was a moment where Christoph Waltz plays the piano in 'Django [Unchained]' - Jamie [Foxx] is a magnificent piano-player but there's never a moment where Django plays the piano.

I mean, of course "King Kong" is a metaphor for the slave trade. I'm not saying the makers of "King Kong" meant it to be that way, but that's what, that's the movie that they made - whether they meant to make it or not.

I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.

... Revenge, ... All of a sudden, revenge started brewing in the back of their minds.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my fingers upon thee!

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

I look at 'Death Proof' and realize I had too much time.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

I wasn't a predator. I didn't pick on other people all right, but people didn't beat me up.

One thing I don't understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they'll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends.

I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.

ou know, if you want to see jackbooting Nazis in movies, you've got to watch American movies made at that time.

To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.

Some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that - the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad.

Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.

Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.

If you were a U.S. Cavalry guy and you thought you were going to be captured by the Apaches, you might kill yourself. If they were with their wives and they thought they were going to be captured, they would shoot their wives for fear of the Apaches getting them.

Oh gosh, well, you know, growing up in the '70s being a young boy there, you know, there were still exploitation movies, where, you know, were, you know, still opened up every week and, you know, played - sometimes they would play it at the local, you know, mall theater.

I felt no obligation to bow to any 21st Century political correctness. What I did feel an obligation to do was to take the 21stCentury viewers and physically transport them back to the ante bellum South in 1858, in Mississippi, and have them look at America for what it was back then. And I wanted it to be shocking.

Well, it's funny because, "The Green Leaves of Summer" and "The Alamo" theme are the same thing. There's just - the Brothers Four was a different recording of it.

It's my job to look at other people's humanity and it's my job to, 24/7, look at my life and listen to everything everyone says, watching their faces, the little idiosyncratic aspects of human beings - it's like a sponge, I take it in.

I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.

When I went to do my big audition with actors for Mr. Blonde, the thing that was very interesting was the first person to actually do the audition with the song, and they kind of actually acted out the whole scene, they weren't so great. It wasn't that they were magnificent, but the song, it was the first -it was all - been in my head.