Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Tarantino - Page 4

If I'm on an airplane, a Kate Hudson movie is what I'm looking for. I'll sit there and I'll cry. I think it's the altitude or something like that.

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.

It hit me that an Apache resistance would be a wonderful, you know, it would be a wonderful metaphor for Jewish-American soldiers to be using behind enemy lines against the Nazis because the Apache Indians... were able to fight off for decades both the Spaniards and the Mexicans and the U.S. Cavalry for years because of their - they were great guerrilla fighters. They were great resistance fighters. And one of their ways of winning battles was psychological battles.

I think that's, it's my way of writing, it's my, it's part of you know for lack of a better word, God-given talent that I have that I'm really good at that kind of dialogue.

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery.

I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.

To me, torture would be watching sports on television.

I remember when it was reported that I was going to do the film in this format, people were actually speculating, and I guess I understand it. They were like, "Yeah, okay, that all sounds really great, but why would he do it for a thing that's so set bound?" That's not very profound thinking when it comes to 65mm. It's not just for shooting travelogues, mountain scenery and nature.

I'm very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it's way into the piece.

And there's wordplay and there's rhythms and you have to be able to get the poetry out of it. You have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Sam Jackson can do that. Sam Jackson can turn it into the spoken word that it was always meant to be and he can sell my jokes. And Christopher Walken can do it and a lot of people can do it, all right.

"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know that, your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I - but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class, so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant.

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or while I'm writing it or when I'm making it. Because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.

I don't feel any 'white guilt,' because I had nothing to do with (slavery) whatsoever. I feel shame for my country that it happened and that's why I feel we need to deal with it.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.

Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.

I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.

I'm not a huge big fan of music video.

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.

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.

The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin.

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

I just realized that I need to be a director - for two reasons. One, directors were already my heroes at this point. I wanted to; when I wanted to be an actor I wanted to work with this director. Not work with this actor, I wanted to work for this director.

When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And then Christoph [Waltz] came in, and I didn't know who Christoph was.

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.

I laugh all the time. I'm an easy laugher. You can find me on any set, because I'm always laughing.

If the film is nominated for awards, and even if it wins them, it doesn't make the movie any better, just as if it's ignored that doesn't make the movie any worse.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but when you try to deal with prescient themes in the present, that is what you're doing.

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 writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But because she was Hitler's favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels.

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.

Even Christoph Waltz's character, Colonel Landa in 'Inglourious Basterds', I never judged him.

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

If you're trying to drop ten pages from a screenplay, it hurts like hell, but if you just put it away for a month and then take it out, you can do it just like that!

When I was on The View, Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back, 'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.'

I found this really fantastic used record store in Japan, and I bought all these different records and different 45s, and one of the 45s was just, it had the theme, "Green Leaves of Summer," the theme to "The Alamo" on one side, and then on the flip side was a theme to, the theme to "The Magnificent Seven."

I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not.

But can I tell the genuine-article Italian from the poseur Italian? No. To me they all seem like poseurs.

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Batman is not a very interesting character. For any actor. There is simply not much to play. I think Michael Keaton did it the best, and I wish good luck to Ben Affleck. But, you know who would have made a great Batman? Alec Baldwin in the '80s.

I am doing what I'm doing, and if you don't like it, don't go see it.

I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.

They [American Indians] never did straight-up fights. It wasn't about, you know, getting killed in the line of fire. It was all ambush, ambush, ambush, and you ambush somebody, and then you take the scalps, and you - even though scalping wasn't created by the American Indians. It was created by the white man against Indians, and they just took it and claimed it.

I liked the Hollywood stuff. But I also liked the fact that in both, you know, I guess in the, like, the auteur, the art film auteur at that time was Lina Wertmuller. So, you go see "Swept Away" or you go see a movie she did "Blood Feud" with Sophia Loren and Giancarlo Giannini. And I remember "Wifemistress" was a big movie at that time, really liked it, Laura Antonelli.

You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.

I surprised myself, that I was in the tissue of the character enough, that I could actually come up with something that I didn't actually feel or didn't believe.

What I would do is I would just remember the scene and I'd go home and I'd write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn't remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we'd do it.

There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.

I hate school at that time. Now, little did I know that actually if I had stayed in school I would've actually really liked college. I wasn't aware enough to know that the junior high I was suffering through would be school at its worst.

The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.

I'll write for a while and then I'll find an appropriate song and in a weird way the music will keep me in the mood. I find music to define the mood of the movie, the rhythm the movie is going to play in.

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.

Unfortunately, every time I have somebody play an instrument, it's always like, they don't know how to do it.

I will never do Pulp [Fiction] 2 but having said that, I could very well do other movies with these characters.

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.

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

I shot the way I wanted to shoot [in The Hateful Eight]. The only real disadvantage I felt at the time, but I don't feel now, was that we weren't able to get a zoom lens, and I had really gotten used to using a zoom lens for that little zoom creep. But it was also a nice thing to be forced to not use all the tools that you've gotten used to, from time to time, and to be able to work in a different way.

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.