Tarantino-mania

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Yesterday, I got to hear Quentin Tarantino speak. I was in the front row, like a goo-goo eyed teenager at a Beatle’s concert in the mid-60s. Thankfully, I managed not to scream or faint.

Here’s my favorite moment from his talk: A questioner in the back of the auditorium, leading up to her question, says, “You’re known for loving to put lots of dialogue/violence in your films . . . “ And he calls out, “ESPECIALLY THE SLASH!”

Another favorite moment: Asked about what genres he has not yet worked in but would like to, he at first says all genres. But then admits he will likely never do a Jane Austen adaptation. Amidst laughter, he goes into a momentary imagining of a violence ridden Pride and Prejudice. Then, as a barely audible aside, “But I couldn’t do a trunk shot.” (But you can, Quentin! It would just be a leather buckled traveling trunk!)

One more: Asked about the response in the Jewish community to Inglourious Basterds, he says “I’ve really been enjoying reading what they have to say about the film. You know, all the think pieces and the Rabbi blogs.” Rabbi blogs?

How can you not love Quentin Tarantino? He’s so unvarnished and genuine. I could have listened to him for hours. But enough of the fangirl talk. Let’s get to the substance.

I was gratified to hear in his descriptions of his creative process some reinforcement for those aspects of screenwriting that can be difficult to get students to accept, such as the importance of character bios. He writes extensive accounts of a character’s life history and their personality quirks before he starts on the screenplay. Do you tell this to the actor in the audition process, asked the interviewer? “No, I wait til they get the part. Then I vomit it all out on them.” And you do this depth of work even though the great majority of it never appears in the film? “Yeah,” he said. “You [the audience] don’t have to know any of this shit. But you have to know that I know it.”

Another such item came out of his mention that when he’s auditioning, he’s also trying to remember how to direct again cause he’s been away from it for a while. Someone in the audience asked, “What do you mean when you say that? What exactly do you forget?” An understandable question from our perspective as admirers of him as a master director. Most of us would probably be happy simply to know half of all the stuff he claims to be forgetting.

But his response was to talk about how, when he’s writing, he writes stuff that he doesn’t have the faintest idea how he’s going to make happen on the screen. Then he went into an elaborate description of an action sequence that he had to work with the stunt crew to innovate a new technique for. His point was that he did in the end figure out how to do it. So what he was also saying was that its not that the directing knowledge simply flies out of his head. It’s more about how important it is to the writing process to not constrain his imagination. He has to forget about directing so he can write freely. He has to literally stop being a director and turn into a writer. Then when the script is done and he’s ready to go into production, he has to turn back into a director again. (How many times have I said to students, “Don’t direct your script on the page!”)

Then someone asked the question all aspiring writers want to know from a master: Can you describe your writing process? Here’s what he said: “I start with a genre I want to work in, then I come up with a story and then I develop a bunch of characters. I let it all incubate for a long time, filling up notepads with ideas and dialogue bits. It’s all marinating inside me and I’m thinking about it every so often. Then, when I find that every time I’m not thinking of something else, my mind goes back to this story, then I know its time to start writing. I fill up, fill up, fill up, fill up, fill up. Then I write.”

So what did I, personally, learn from this action-packed, fun-filled hour of rapid-fire repartee? Well, I learned that I was right about something. A few weeks ago, when I was lecturing on Pulp Fiction in class, I was telling my students about the first time I analyzed the film, over ten years ago, when I went to the library to see what other people had said about it. Looking it up in the various indexes, I came across an interesting array of titles: “Pulp Fiction as a Study of Violence in Our Society;” “Pulp Fiction: Masculinity and Gender Representation;” “Pulp Fiction: A Story of Redemption and Salvation;” “Pulp Fiction and the Femme Fatale;” and so on.

I then read them a quote of Tarantino’s that I had pulled off the DVD extras: “I always hope that if one million people see my movie, they see a million different movies.” I was trying to make the point that one of the unique characteristics of this film, and a mark of its artistry, is the high degree of its interpretability. Then I said to my students, “I don’t know if Tarantino has been to the library and seen all these scholarly article titles. But my guess is, if he did, he would be very pleased.”

I think it was after Tarantino mentioned how he has enjoyed reading the Rabbi blogs that the interviewer said, “I can see mountains of Ph.D. dissertations being written on this film.” To which he replied, “That would be great.”

Ha! I was right!

But then . . . he surprised me with his next comment. “I love intellectual discourse and subtextual film criticism,” he said.

Really? This I didn’t know.

“Not that its about the movie,” he went on. “But its about how people are seeing it.”

Please, Quentin, say more about that.