Quentin Tarantino interview: 'All my movies are achingly personal'
"All my movies are achingly personal,†he insists. “People who really know me can see that in my work. In a film, I may be talking about a bomb in a theatre, but that’s not what I’m really talking about.†As he says this he laughs an evasive, slightly goading laugh. So, what is he really talking about? “Well, it’s not my job to tell you,†he says. “My job is to hide it.â€
He has always written dialogue for imaginary scenes, he says, since he was a child, but it wasn’t until he took evening acting classes in the early Nineties for which he would write the scripts he performed, that people told him he had a gift for words. “That was the first time anyone had ever complimented me or given me any encouragement about my writing and from that day on I started taking it more seriously.â€
Tarantino quit school – “the worst institution ever imposed on me†– at 16 and took a job as an usher at “a full-on triple-X porno cinema†called the Pussycat Theatre. He then spent most of his twenties working for the minimum wage at a video rental shop in Manhattan Beach, California, watching obscure films, writing speculative screenplays and figuring out how to become a famous director. “I have always considered that with all the setbacks I had, the fact that I didn’t give up is maybe the one thing in my life that I am most proud of,†he says. “I just knew I would live a life of unfulfillment if I didn’t keep trying.
Tarantino’s reputation, at the age of 29, as one of the most exciting new talents in the business. “It was,†he says, “the complete utter payoff of perseverance.â€
“I’ve been alone most of my life, I was an only child, raised by a single mother, so I am very comfortable with my own company.†His attempts to divert his attention from film-making often fail. When he reads a book, it takes him “twice as long as normal people†because he’s constantly figuring out how he would film it. His passion for cinema is all-consuming.
Does he ever have doubts? Moments when he fears he has dedicated too much of himself to film, to his attempts to carve a monument in a medium that deals, after all, in flickering shadows on a screen? “No,†he says, emphatically. “I feel the exact opposite, actually. The day I don’t want to give everything to making movies is the day I want to quit. It’s not a part-time thing. It’s not a summer house, it’s not a second house, it’s the house. It’s my life.
“I ask myself am I giving it enough? Am I concentrating enough? Am I devoting enough of my life to it? That’s what I’m here for right now. If you’re a mountain climber and your desire is to climb Everest and Fuji and Kilimanjaro – that’s what you’re doing. It ain’t about nothing else. When you’re climbing Everest you’re not thinking about your bills and you’re not thinking about your girlfriend, you’re not thinking about bull---t that all the other humans are thinking about. You’re thinking about Everest.
Full interview:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...view-All-my-movies-are-achingly-personal.html