Happy Birthday: Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

Born: March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

[on the inspiration for Pulp Fiction (1994)] And so I thought the idea that would, in the case of Pulp Fiction, would be kind of cool, was to take three separate stories, and make them the oldest stories in the book, whether it be, um…Vincent’s character, the hoodlum, has to go out with the boss’s lady, but don’t touch her! And there’s the whole history of people who *have* touched her, and what happens. Well we’ve seen that before, a zillion times…and the case of the Bruce Willis story, that the boxer’s supposed to throw the fight, and he doesn’t, and now the mob’s after him…we’ve seen that story a million times as well. And one of the things I thought about, like, the third story, was basically kind of the beginning of, at that time, almost every Joel Silver movie, which would start off with like a couple hit men showing up, boom boom, alright, ‘you wanna witness something witness this!’ (makes gun shooting noise, laughs). And then they shoot the guy and it cuts to Arnold Schwarzenegger walking through the forest and eventually he’s gonna meet those guys. And so I thought, what happens if we hung out with them? All night long? Or…all day long? After they’ve killed the guy, what happens with the rest of their day? And so it was like taking these, these chestnuts and putting them together and then, actually having the characters kind of intertwine and it all kind of takes place in one…city, and it’s an environment that they all live in, and characters kind of know each other, but you don’t know that for a while. And we’re just kind of hanging out with them for those two days.

(on once working at an adult movie theater) To me, the greatest job a person could ever have is being an usher at a movie theater. You get to go to a movie theater all day long, and then you get to see all the movies for free. Irony of ironies, I end up getting a job at a movie theater where I could care less about the movies and was totally bored by them.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

[on Reservoir Dogs (1992)] This movie was never meant to be everything for everybody. And I don’t mean that as a slam. I’m just saying I made this movie for myself and everybody else is invited.

[on Pulp Fiction (1994)] Three stories about one story.

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