Quentin Tarantino: Mr. Red

Here's some dialogue cut from the final screen version of True Romance. (Parental discretion is advised):

DREXL: ... I wanna ask you a question. You with some fine bitch, I mean a brick shithouse bitch... you're with Jayne Kennedy and you say, "Bitch, suck my dick." And then Jayne Kennedy says, "First things first nigger, I ain't suckin' shit till you bring your ass over here and lick my bush." Now what do you say?

FLOYD: I tell Jayne Kennedy "Suck my dick or I'll beat your ass."

Here's some dialogue not cut from True Romance. (Discretion still advised): "It's a fact. Sicilians have black blood pumping through their hearts. You see, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the Moors conquered Sicily. And Moors are niggers. They did so much fuckin' with the Sicilian women they changed the bloodline forever from blond hair and blue eyes to black hair and dark skin."

Here are young black filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes on the subject of this crazy white boy: "We love Quentin Tarantino... [but] he's gotta stop using that nigger shit... That [is] straight-up racist."

I tell Tarantino about the Hughes Brothers' comments, and he says he hasn't read that interview, but that such criticism in general "doesn't bother me. That's the way my characters talk--in the movies I've made so far. I also feel that that word 'nigger' is one of the most volatile words in the English language and anytime anyone gives a word that much power, I think everybody should be shouting it from the rooftops to take the power away. I grew up around blacks and have no fear of it. I grew up saying it as an expression.

"One thing that was kinda cool," he continues, "Spike Lee called me to talk to his film class at Harvard. He and I had never spoken. He asked me, 'What's your obsession with blacks? Your films have a big black subtext and culture even when they're about whites.' He said, 'Well yeah, there's all that "nigger" shit in Dogs' but he wasn't being judgmental. He was curious." Tarantino must have reached Spike on a very good day, since I just saw him on "Arsenio," explaining how the use of "nigger" by a rap star was indefensible. Then again, maybe Spike just thinks Tarantino's a crazy white boy.

In True Romance, the hero interrupts his deadly confrontation with the killer pimp to set the record straight on the movie playing on the TV in the background: it's blacksploitation classic The Mack, he saw it seven years ago, and it stars Max Julien and Richard Pryor. That's Tarantino talking--he spent his adolescence in black movie theaters watching kung fu, exploitation and blacksploitation flicks. "I grew up around black culture and love it," he says. "Especially the '70s black culture." You can see it in his own movies: from shootouts to attitudes, plenty of moments that owe as much to hard-core inner city '70s action films like The Mack, Coffy, Superfly et al, as they do to spaghetti westerns or the French New Wave. "One of the coolest perks of fame is that I've been able to track down some of my heroes growing up. I met Pam Grier, and it was so cool. I have all these Pam Grier posters in my office--_The Big Bird Cage_, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba Baby. She came in and goes, 'Did you put all these posters up because you knew I was coming in?' I said, 'No--I almost took them down because you were coming in!'"

Waitress? More coffee over here!

When Tony Scott directed True Romance, he was remarkably faithful to Tarantino's script--except he gave the story of two young lovers on the run a radically upbeat ending and added a fairy tale gloss. Still, Tarantino says that, when it comes down to it, he's satisfied with Scott's movie. It seems unlikely he'll feel that way about Oliver Stone's version of his Natural Born Killers script, which Stone read, purportedly loved, and optioned before Dogs was even made. In the end, he completely rewrote Tarantino's script, and there have been reports that tension has developed between the two because of it.

"I'm pretty mercurial on the subject, all right?" Tarantino says. "Because I didn't want to make the movie and I didn't want anyone else to make it. Everyone in the world is trying to get a movie made. I didn't want a movie made and it got made. Stone took it and completely rewrote the script. I tried to talk him out of doing the movie. I said, 'Why don't you just rip off the ideas that you like?' But he was like, 'I'd never do that.' It was out of my hands--these producers had an option on it, not given to them by me, when Stone got involved. There's still sore wounds about the whole thing. But I'm actually pretty cool about it right now. We worked out the credit situation. I'm going to get just a 'story by' credit. That's what I wanted."

Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Natural Born Killers while working in a video store, and didn't know which one (if any) he'd get to direct first (if ever). Finally, after a few frustrating false starts, he decided to shoot Dogs guerrilla style, using family and friends. Then Harvey Keitel read the script and decided he was holding something hot. The rest is a quintessential Hollywood success story--or at least the first act of one. Plenty of critics and audiences didn't go for the violence of Dogs. The film was not a mainstream hit, but at a cost of $1.5 million, it didn't have to be. Anyway, Tarantino says he's uninterested in the "horse race" mentality that governs how Hollywood measures a film's success. True Romance was a flop (by Hollywood standards) and Natural Born Killers was eviscerated. Which brings us to Act II.

Pulp Fiction is the first pure Tarantino product since Dogs; Shot for less than $10 million, sporting an eclectic cast including Travolta, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Eric Stoltz, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, it is, in Tarantino fashion, a righteously funny, yet definitely grotesque melange of oddball crooks, doomed romantics, great dialogue and crimes against humanity. It's the most original script I've read in a long time --and I have no fucking idea what the world will make of this movie.

"I don't want to be this little art house guy who does a particular kind of picture for a particular audience," says Tarantino. "That's just as much of a talent-strangling road as becoming a hack and doing every picture that comes along. I don't want people saying, 'Oh, it's the new Tarantino movie. It's just like the last Tarantino movie...'"

I wait for him to tell me how he's going to break out of that mold, but he doesn't. So I finish the thought for him: "In which case, you should make something besides violent-crime genre flicks that end in Mexican standoffs." He seems to agree--to a point. He'd like to do a musical, or a kid's film like The Bad News Bears. Sure, why the hell not? The Bad News Bears in Breaking Parole. "Pulp Fiction is very much a getting-it-out-of-your-system film," says Tarantino. "But on the other hand, if I come up with a really great idea and it's a crime film, should I not do it because I've done all these others? I'm not gonna let thoughts like that dictate my life."

Tarantino likes Pauline Kael's image of Godard as a movie-mad Frenchman sitting in a cafe, scribbling down the poetry he discovers between the lines of American hard-boiled fiction and turning it into movies. If any young Hollywood filmmaker is attempting something comparable right now, it's Tarantino. I'll bet dimes to petrodollars that Tarantino's chapter will be longer than Kurt Cobain's. Who, incidentally, had he lived in Tarantino's world, wouldn't have had to blow his own head off. Someone would gladly have done it for him.

__________________

Joshua Mooney interviewed James Cameron for the July Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3