Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Tarantino - Page 5

I was trying to do like a spaghetti western but using World War II iconography.

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

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.

He musta thought it was white boy day. It ain't white boy day, is it?

Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies.

I was just this video-store guy and now I was actually making movies and stuff.

I've always seen in Westerns it described or it's shown very vaguely, but I wanted this - I want us to show what they're doing to them, so you can actually see it. And if you notice in the movie, you know, it goes even beyond just scalping and stuff.

But the idea of using the Apache resistance, one, it works effective to actually get German soldiers to think of Jews that way. You know, and they're not just any Jews. They're the American Jews. They're Jews with entitlement.

Sometimes things need to get really bad before they can ever get better. Really bad can become untenable if enough people get sick of it. That was a big thing about why I ended up taking part in that rally [against police brutality] and ended up voicing my opinion and declaring what side I was standing on.

But the truth of the matter is, that was fairly, fairly early on in Goebbels' 800 movies that he made in Germany. The majority of them, especially once the war got going, you hardly saw Nazi officers in it at all. They were mostly musicals and comedies and melodramas and stories of great German men from the past.

I've never used High Definition video, never, ever, ever, ever, ever. And I never will. I can't stand that crap.

If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of.

I don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies, and I don’t want to be the one not to know when to leave the party.

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.

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever.

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

You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences.

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex.

Sure, and that's the cool thing about DVD: you can pack stuff on the disc that would've been too much for the big screen because actually it would've only interested yourself and a bunch of fanboys, who wanna know everything.

A thing when I was writing the movie 'The hateful eight' was, I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika. So I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period.

My earliest childhood memories are of watching Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. I remember not liking Frankenstein then and going, "Who is this bald guy?" But I love it now.

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

Apache have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that's - again, that's a gigantic psychological thing.

A lot of them [Germaqn actors] could come in and we could speak for the next nine hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - but it was - English wasn't the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a poetic quality to my dialogue.

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.

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.

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.

I'm wondering if the crew [from'The Hateful Eight'] had some sort of nickname for me. I am blanking at anything truly funny, so I'll just say, 'No Phone Quentin'.

You know, my problem with most screenwriting is it is a blueprint. It's like they're afraid to write the damn thing. And I'm a writer. That's what I do. I want it to be written. I want it to work on the page first and foremost. So when I'm writing the script, I'm not thinking about the viewer watching the movie. I'm thinking about the reader reading the script.

I live in the Hollywood Hills. When I see a cop driving around there, I actually assume that he has my best interests at heart and that he has the best interests of my property at heart. I think if you'd go to Pasadena, they'd say the same thing. And I think if you knocked on doors in Glendale and asked them, they'd say the same thing.

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.

You get to be analytical about the process and now I can watch the movie and see all the different connection things and see all the things that are underneath the surface.

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.

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.

I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs' I like booties'. I have a black male sexuality.

Then they'd [Nazi] make movies against England, you know, in the same way, to help, you know, feather their nest for what they - their aggressions.

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

With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."

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.

You can do all these kinds of things that are up close and personal, but you really have to bring your strength, and really - you have to really be committed to actually strangle the life out of somebody, to crush their larynx and just squeeze every drop of life out of 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 like my song-sequences in my movies, but one of the things I like about them, is I get in and I get out.

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.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

I always thought it was a B.S. thing that they didn't show it [scalping] in other Westerns, but especially if you're going to really go with the idea that we're desecrating the bodies, and the idea is to strike fear in the hearts of other German soldiers, then we had to see what they're talking about.

The only other animals that would be in the ballpark to be able to do it would be a gorilla, but it's not going to occur to a gorilla to strangle the life out of somebody. They might rip their head off, all right, but it wouldn't occur to a gorilla to just, I'm going to cut off your air.

I would've written this story [Django] if [Barack] Obama were president or if he never existed. For one, I think it's time to tell a story that deals with this subject America has avoided for so long. Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities of their past that still affect them to this day. But America has been pretty slippery in the way that it has avoided looking slavery in the eye. I believe that's a problem.

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.

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.

If it's too much for people, if audiences don't accept it, well I guess that's just the way it is. I'm not being cavalier when it comes to my financial partners, but I think I've earned the right to do my thing my way. While I really want it to do well and it would be lovely if it's popular, movies are for a long time. I'm really proud of the piece. If it ends up not connecting with audiences, I won't be heartbroken. I'll be a little disappointed, but I won't be heartbroken.

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.

I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre.