How Tarantino lost and found the acting bug
LOS ANGELES—“Cinemanila!” Quentin Tarantino exclaimed in our recent encounter. “That was fun!” He was, of course, referring to the film festival in the Philippines that honored him in 2007.
Wearing a hooded jacket, his hair unruly as usual, Quentin talked in the energetic style he’s known for. His enthusiastic manner of answering questions is matched by his infectious, noholding-back laughter.
Quentin recently won the Golden Globe best screenplay for “Django Unchained,” which he also directed. While it’s classified as a drama in a spaghetti western vein, “Django…” mixes in humor that made us really laugh.
Tackling the subject of slavery in the South two years before the American Civil War, “Django...” stars Jamie Foxx in the title role, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.
In this interview, Quentin perfectly described Christoph— who won the Golden Globe best supporting actor for his portrayal of a smooth-talking bounty hunter—as an actor who “truly sings my dialogue. He makes it poetry.”
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is my favorite movie of all time. The whole “Dollars Trilogy” (“A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) is my favorite. Actually, “Once Upon a Time in the West” could have been the fourth film, had Clint Eastwood played the role when it was offered to him.
I’m a huge fan of Sergio Corbucci films, particularly “Navajo We know you have an impressive collection of films, even Filipino B movies and Filipino versions of spaghetti westerns, at home. Which of the spaghetti westerns do you like most? Joe”—it’s one of my favorites with Burt Reynolds. And also “The Hellbenders,” another Corbucci movie with Joseph Cotten. I’m also a big fan of another film that’s really iconic, “Day of Anger” with Lee Van Cleef. Can you describe your bedroom? I imagine it has 10 remote controls and hundreds of DVDs under the bed.
It’s funny, my room doesn’t have a lot of my accoutrements. My house is full of accoutrements. But the bedroom is kept clear of a lot of that. It’s the most uncluttered place, even though it’s still kind of cluttered. It’s a good pacing place. It’s got a nice bed. But off this room is my record room.
Basically, the house I have has a big master bedroom. There was a nursery attached to it. I turned the nursery into a record room. It looks like a used record store where records are filed in bins, into categories. That’s where I play mymusic and when I’m thinking about the movie, working things out in my head. I’ll go and play my soundtracks, the different music I’m thinking about doing for the movie.
I do a lot of my writing on the balcony that’s right outside my bedroom. The film is campy, serious and comedic. How did you balance it all and in the spaghetti western genre?
I thought that putting America’s slavery and racist past in the framework of a subgenre of the spaghetti western was a good