By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
QT-Apple pie: distilled Tarantino
Drawn from “Quentin Tarantino Meets Fiona Apple,” almost 1,600 words from the gob of QT: “One of my favourite scenes of all time is the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Matador: the guy getting off on slasher films. That is a touched-by-God, genius moment. I remember talking to some of the guys I worked with at the Video Archives store and saying, “Man, I’d love to do an opening to a movie like that.” And someone said: “Yeah, they wouldn’t let you.” People have said little things like that all my life. But who’s “they”? I’ve given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything—I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission. There is no “they”… You have a loaded gun, and you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off. It’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun, never raising it, never pulling the trigger, never blowing their heads off. It’s about not going there—but knowing you can.” Violence is “cinematic,” QT says. “It’s almost as if Edison and the Lumiere brothers invented the camera for filming violence.” Pride of accomplishment? “I’ve never done a car chase before, and if I’m gonna do it, it has to be one of the best in the history of cinema… Directors don’t get better as they get older. They get worse—they get out of touch. There is this weird thing about movie-making where you kind of figure out how to do it. You’re just pulled along by the experience—there’s no way you can predict what’s going to happen. And on the second one, you know a hell of a lot more than you did on the first one, but you’re still being pulled along at least 25%. But when it came to the third one, now I kind of got it, and that was scary to me… I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job… Whether it’s hardship or ruin, or hardship or good times, or happy or sad, or profitable or destitute—whatever the deal is, you go down the road today, and maybe your rewards are today, or maybe your rewards will be tomorrow, or maybe in another life, but you’re going your own way.”