QT8: The First Eight

Who do you know right now that's dangerous?

I got a friend and he and I love to fuck shit up.

There is no one like Quentin.

There's Quentin.

He makes a different kind of movie.

You're gonna land the word nigger a hundred

and ten times on Christmas?

Quentin loves strong female characters.

Brilliant, hilarious, and disturbing.

From the mind of Quentin Tarantino,

he really is a powerhouse of creativity.

It's Quentin's World.

It's his baby.

He wrote it.

He's a lightning rod.

He's absolutely unique.

He's the voice of his generation.

It's the end of an era of Quentin

and the Weinstein Company.

He's not gonna fade out.

This is why he talks about making ten.

Quentin is a champion of the female.

And he's just the build,

but he gets the opportunity to do this.

And then there are the movies.

Now, that's what he says about himself,

about how he sees the world,

his very purpose of existence.

Quentin's sort of a natural born filmmaker.

It's his passion.

It's where he connects with the full range of

human feeling.

And I think that you really see the through line

of his fascinations as a human being running

all the way through what matters to him,

looking at race in America...

...looking at what is romance...

...commitment...

...honor...

...betrayal,

loyalty...

...and people having to

do the right thing.

It's for sure the end of an era. The Weinsteins

have been the distributor of every single film of

...his in the United States.

Eight movies, all of them,

very successful.

He surely is immortality.

A friend of mine, he turned me onto Quentin Tarantino,...

...who was

stuffing video boxes at Imperial Entertainment.

And we had this meeting and he seemed like kind of

an overzealous geek.

Pardon, pardon me.

But guess what?

He had the talent to back it up.

He would sleep on my couch.

I don't think he had a car at the time

and flat broke.

"I want to get in the movie business.

Do I think I can write?

I'm gonna give it a stab, 'cause all it takes is

a pen and paper."

I asked him about

writing on a computer.

He said, "You can't write on a computer."

I'm like, "Why not?"

He's like, "You can't write poetry on a computer.

He's like, "My pen is my antennae to God.

That's how I write.

It just- it just flows.

It's just a receiver."

He has a red pen and a black pen, felt tip,

and yellow legal pad, and dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit.

That was it.

Five minutes later, he's got dialogue that would

take some people an entire lifetime to write.

I think Quentin basically writes novels

and then when he's directing, he's basically adapting

his own novel to the screen.

A lot of different things are gonna happen.

It's a roller coaster ride. Oh, yeah, baby.

You're gonna be horrified.

You're gonna feel relief. Then say something.

Something.

You're gonna feel romance.

Quentin is above all a romantic.

First script, True Romance,

Clarence saving Alabama is the beginning of rescuing

the princess that really pays off in Django coming

back to rescue Broomhilda.

The first script of his I read was Natural Born Killers.

And when I read that I went,

whoa, this guy's amazing.

Then I read True Romance.

I went, what the?

What's going on.

What's wrong with Hollywood?

Where is everybody?

You'd take home a slog of twenty scripts a weekend

and you're looking for that thing that jumps off

the page where the characters are alive,

where the dialogue doesn't feel trite.

Every kid wants to give you a script

and you- you- you with the best intentions,

you go, God, I hope this is good.

And then by page two it's like turning like

oh, I can't turn the page.

This is really just terrible.

Not with Quentin.

No way.

Oh, they're brilliant screenplays.

Can you imagine having to sell those to pay your rent?

I mean, wow, you know.

I read a lot.

Especially about things

about history.

I find that shit fascinating.

Here's a fact.

I don't know whether you know or not.

Well...

Sicilians were spawned by niggers.

Uh, come again?

You look at the stuff that Quentin writes.

If it was on stage, he'd have the Pulitzer.

You know, because it's movies,

everyone said, "Oh, he was in a video store.

He stole."

Which of course launched a thousand people working

in video stores going,

"Oh, I'm gonna be the next Tarantino."

Well, literally, there's Quentin

and there's everyone else.

There's great stories, great characters.

Later on in the story...

Clearly in True Romance,

Clarence is a surrogate for Quentin.

You see his love of cinema present in his voice

as he expertly carries you through his films.

Oh! Ooh. You have three kung-fu moves.

In the original draft, his version of True Romance,

it was non-linear storytelling.

The audience is ahead of the characters

and on the edge of their seat

'cause they know something bad's coming.

And Tony Scott in his adaptation made it linear,

and Quentin loves True Romance,

but Clarence died in Quentin's version.

Sweetie! (sobs)

He had sold True Romance.

He was hoping to direct it.

Baby!

He wasn't gonna be able to.

He couldn't get anywhere with Natural Born Killers.

Um, he couldn't get that going to direct, also.

And he wrote Reservoir Dogs so that it would be

set in one contained place,

so that no matter what happened,

he was gonna direct this movie

with the twenty thousand dollars he had made on

Golden Girls residuals for being an Elvis impersonator.

I do love you with all my heart.

I read a script of

Reservoir Dogs and I just hoped that the writer

who said he was going to be the director

was really a director.

I introduced him to my friend Lawrence Bender,

and Lawrence got Reservoir Dogs all up and running.

And Lawrence said, "Give me a month.

I know somebody who knows Harvey Keitel."

And Harvey said yes.

I was pumping gas, man.

I was driving a tow truck and,

uh, I had done Thelma and Louise

and I had done some episodic TV.

And I got that thing and, you know,

I- I- I'd never read anything like it in my life.

These guys and they're named after colors.

Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue,

Mr. Orange, and Mr. Pink.

Why am I Mr. Pink?

And I remember my agent, she was saying,

"Well, you know, they all kill each other at the end and,

you know,

there's no money and, uh, you know,

nobody's ever heard of this Quentin guy and...

You have no way of knowing

with a first time director whether they can direct or not.

You never know.

But Quentin, even then, prior to making any film,

knew every actor's resume.

This guy was in this.

I want this guy from this, and this Lawrence Tierney

was in Dillinger and I want him.

He just set about putting together the ensemble

and it came out exactly the way he wanted it.

I don't know why he had me stuck in his head to play

Mr. Blonde, 'cause I didn't want to play Mr. Blonde.

I didn't want to get shot by Tim Roth, you know.