Tarantino Movie Quotes

Gentlemen you had my curiosity ... but now you have my attention.

Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin, Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd. he became the shepherd instead of the vengeance. Jules Winnfield- Samuel L. Jackson

You don't have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie.

In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

So, if you're reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don't recognize, congratulations, you're learning something

No, he wants to help me get into Italian movies.” Quick comeback from Cliff: “Then what’s the problem?” Rick screams, “I gotta do fuckin’ Italian movies, that’s the goddamn fuckin’ problem!

Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases. I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC

Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It’s just a movie. You don’t have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong.

Continued remarks about John and Lisa being like Clarence and Alabama in True Romance or Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers had lifted the atmosphere somewhat.

Who wants to spend three months making a fucked-up version of their movie?

I rented a dark little bar on Sunset Boulevard that had pool tables, three bars inside and out, and a movie theater where we played only Quentin Tarantino movies all night.

There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn't be the goal. Nevertheless, when it's accomplished (even by accident), it's an achievement.

It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: "What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that's not what you pay actors to do.

And right from the get-go when George Segal puts on a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punches him in the nuts, this movie had me. At that age, the height of comedy was a guy in a gorilla suit, and the only thing funnier than that was a guy getting punched in the nuts. So a guy in a gorilla suit getting punched in the nuts was the absolute pinnacle of comedy.

To one degree or another I've spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown Film..

I don't know how he died, where he died, or where he's buried. But I do know I should've thanked him.

So, if you're reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don't recognize, congratulations, you're learning something.

Like the atomic bomb, it’s there; like the bomb, the temptation will always exist to use it.There can no longer be a world without the atomic bomb; there can no longer be a world without violent movies.

I gave her the remote and she chose a channel showing Inglourious Basterds. She said the title was spelled that way because Tarantino had misspelled it in a leaked screenplay and then insisted he’d done it on purpose.

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 still should want to watch the movie and enjoy it. Certain actors can play grotesque bad guys, yet they still have a connection to the audience. We still enjoy them as performers. They do cruel deeds, they're monsters, but we enjoy their monsters because when they're on screen we known something exciting will happen.

As with Inglourious Basterds using World War II, Tarantino once again managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history, and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position.

I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”: Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.) I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.

The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.

Then the movie started playing like a real movie. But frankly, a more real movie than we were used to.

What was it about the I'll kill the bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everyone in the theatre had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

So since this generation of genre directors were forced to make what at the end of the day they considered silly stories about cowboys and cops and robbers, in order to make those sill stories mean something to them, they based them in metaphors that pertained to their own lives.

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive. To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them

Almost every genre film made for a while was an Anti-Genre Film. With the idea behind the film being to expose the absurdity and unsavory politics that have hidden underneath said genre since the beginning of Hollywood

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.

When you're writing for an actor like Steve - or, for that matter, any actor - you gain a lot by being able to fashion the material to their strengths. But you lose some when it comes to characterization, because you're going to avoid things that don't show off that actor in the best light.

Not a single scene, situation, idea, or image that was in that screenplay was in my script for Django Unchained. Yet... the essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic western with a black heroic cowboy at its center, was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with Django Unchained. But even more influential than any one script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. The reason I knew how to even format a screenplay was from reading Floyd's screenplays. It would be a long read—from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay -True Romance- in September 1987. But due to Floyd's inspiration I tried writing screenplays. I usually never got that far. I think thirty was by far the furthest I ever got. But I tried. And eventually succeeded.

*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.

D knew at once that this guy was one of those that was always imagining himself in a Tarantino movie.

Quentin Tarantino's movies are really just very long Seinfeld episodes, where a couple people get shot.

But the guy in Breathless [Jean-Paul Belmondo] wasn't just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit. And unlike in a Hollywood movie, they didn't sentimentalize him. They always sentimentalized these pieces of shit in Hollywood movies, and it was the phoniest thing Hollywood did. In the real world, these mercenary fuck faces didn't hae a sentimental bone in their body.

Pulp Fiction was a major success, commercially and critically,” according to Scott Cooper Florida, “It was Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece. Winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994, the movie was also nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and even won Best Original Screenplay.

It was weird when I first saw the movie because it was like looking at a big-budget version of my home movies, or memories.

Elvis movies weren't real movies, they were "Elvis Presley movies