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.
I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.
Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.
I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.
When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid's private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. It's not my job. It's my calling.
Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.
I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends. Paul Thomas Anderson is a genuine friend. Robert Rodriguez is a genuine friend. Rick Richard Linklater is a genuine friend. Eli Roth is a genuine friend. And so is Edgar Wright.
That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.
L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.
Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.
What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether.
Between men and women, all the time there is tension. I feel it. A woman walks down the street, and I'm going back, and suddenly there is this tension. I just walk down the street, we were just on the way. And she thinks I'm a rapist. And now I feel guilty, even though I'm a damn poor did not.
Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
You always have to be keeping track, especially in this scenario [ The Hateful Eight], of where everybody is. They're pieces on a chess board.
One can be inclined to just say, "F this political correctness! I don't have time for that!"
By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.
I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.
A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough.
Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.
Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
What the internet has done is destroy film criticism. I would never have guessed that the profession of film criticism would be going the way of the dodo bird.
I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene just came to me.
Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. Asking me about violence is like going up to Vincente Minnelli and asking him to justify his musical sequences.
I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.
I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.
