Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be involved in movies. I didn’t know
what a director was; I just knew they were the only thing I gave a damn
about.
My favourite movie when I was a little, little boy was Bud Abbott and Lou
Costello Meet Frankenstein. It’s very funny when Abbott and Costello are
around, but when they’re gone, it’s actually played very straight. I
remember having the thought: “These are the best movies ever! When it’s
supposed to be funny, it’s really funny, and when it’s supposed to be scary,
it’s really scary. I can’t believe they make movies like this!” So, even as
a really young child, I was making genre distinctions. I liked this genre
and I liked that genre, and actually blending them was a really sexy thing
to me.
During the 1980s, which was probably one of the most repressive times in
Hollywood cinema, there seemed to be so many rules — heroes can’t be this
and can’t be that and can’t be unlikeable. One of my favourite scenes of all
time is the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Matador: the guy getting off
on slasher films. That is a touched-by-God, genius moment. I remember
talking to some of the guys I worked with at the Video Archives store and
saying, “Man, I’d love to do an opening to a movie like that.” And someone
said: “Yeah, they wouldn’t let you.”
People have said little things like that all my life. But who’s “they”? I’ve
given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything — I can do
anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask
forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission. There is no “they”.
Here’s the thing: they can write a mean letter, they can write a mean memo,
but these guys don’t have any real fight in them. If you’re an artist, as
opposed to a careerist, and your movie is more important to you than a
career in this town, they can never beat you. You have a loaded gun, and you
know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads
off. It’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun,
never raising it, never pulling the trigger, never blowing their heads off.
It’s about not going there — but knowing you can. So, if you have to flash
it, it means something.
Violence is one of the most cinematic things you can do with film. It’s
almost as if Edison and the Lumiere brothers invented the camera for filming
violence. The most cinematic directors, they’re taking cinema and exciting
you. I really do think about it like that. I’m doing my own thing, but I’m
thinking about the audience, too, though not in a manipulative way. I am
the audience. When they’re sitting there and they’re waiting for a car to
crash, it’s like a money shot. At that moment, they want it: they want it to
happen as much as the bad guy does. That’s what they’ve paid to see. And if,
at the last minute, [it is] averted, that’s just me as director as torturer,
’cos I can.
Here’s the thing I had in my life: I never had to worry that I was gonna die
before I made a movie. God had put me on earth to do this thing — he’s not
going to take me out before I can do it. To me, writing the dialogue is so
easy, I actually feel sort of a fraud for taking credit for it, even though
I’m protective of it; I feel like it’s some sort of God antenna. I grew up
in LA, and I loved earthquakes — I didn’t care if they happened in the
morning, the afternoon, the evening. I didn’t get out of bed; I’d surf the
earthquake. God didn’t put me on the earth to die in an earthquake. After
Pulp Fiction, maybe I could go.
I got to know, and had a lovely relationship with, the director Sam Fuller
before he died. I met him on the film-festival circuit. I was there with
Reservoir Dogs, and he goes: “Okay, who’s in your picture?” And I go:
“Harvey Keitel.” “Harvey Keitel? Harvey Keitel is in your picture? Who the
hell are you to be making your first picture with Harvey Keitel? He’s not a
star — he’s a planet!” Then he says: “I’ll tell you what I liked about your
movie: it’s a movie about idiots. All those guys are morons. I don’t even
know how they tied their shoes in the morning. I mean, Harvey, he makes
movies about professionals. Your guys were idiots. It’s about failure.
That’s good; you don’t see that.”
Robert [Rodriguez, the director] and I are doing a double feature, which is a
really fun project because, you know, we’re best friends. We’re doing two
separate movies and releasing them together. It’s really cool, because he
actually got the idea to do this just from hanging out in my house and
watching movies. I really like the exploitation stuff. I have posters all
over my house from the 1950s and 1960s, double-feature posters. I want to
deliver what these posters promise, but those movies never delivered.
Robert’s story is like a zombie movie, and mine is a slasher movie, except
that, as opposed to a guy with a hockey mask and a machete, it’s a guy with
a car. It’s kind of cool, what I’m doing — the New Zealand stunt girl in the
film, Zoe Bell, she was Uma Thurman’s stunt double [in Kill Bill]. She’s
gonna play herself and do her own stunts. It’s cool, also, because I’ve
never done a car chase before, and if I’m gonna do it, it has to be one of
the best in the history of cinema. But that’s really throwing my hat in a
different ring. Like Kill Bill was the first time I’ve ever done that kind
of thing before.
I consider making Kill Bill as like me climbing Mount Everest. I taught
myself how to climb as I climbed it. I would write all these little
scenarios of things that could happen with [Thurman’s character] the Bride,
and I’d take her in one direction, then I’d be like: “Nah, I don’t want to
go there.” So at one point I thought it would be cool for her to get into a
big car chase. She’s in the Pussy Wagon, and she drives under the “bat
bridge” [in Austin, Texas; home to a giant bat colony], and so it’s bats
just bouncing off the windshield. And you cut to the outside of the bridge,
and it’s like 2m bats and this car just ... BOOM!
Now that I’ve climbed Mount Everest, I don’t know if these little hills are
going to be so attractive, but I don’t know if I want to start that
expedition again, either. I met Francis Coppola’s wife, Ellie, and she asked
me: “So, what are you doing next?” And I said: “Well, I’ve been planning
this second world war film for a long while, and it’s time to do it. The
only thing about it is, it’s a big, Mount Everest kind of epic, and I’ve
already climbed a Mount Everest, and I’ve got to get myself up to climb it
again.” When I was through talking, she said: “I think maybe this is the
time in your life that you climb Mount Everest. You may not want to be
climbing Mount Everest 15 years from now.”
Directors don’t get better as they get older. They get worse — they get out
of touch. There is this weird thing about movie-making where you kind of
figure out how to do it. You’re just pulled along by the experience —
there’s no way you can predict what’s going to happen. And on the second
one, you know a hell of a lot more than you did on the first one, but you’re
still being pulled along at least 25%. But when it came to the third one,
now I kind of got it, and that was scary to me.
I don’t want to be a professional. I’m not in the Directors Guild; I don’t
want to be. I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a
professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job. I
even asked: “Would I die for Jackie Brown?” I would have died for Reservoir
Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if I
would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm’s way, for
Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit. I think the reason was that
that film was based on a novel; it wasn’t an original thing, born from me.
Whether it’s hardship or ruin, or hardship or good times, or happy or sad,
or profitable or destitute — whatever the deal is, you go down the road
today, and maybe your rewards are today, or maybe your rewards will be
tomorrow, or maybe in another life, but you’re going your own way.
The Iconoclasts series returns to Sky Arts tonight at 9pm, with Quentin
Tarantino Meets Fiona Apple, from which this is an edited extract. Tarantino
and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse is released later this year
