Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 9:58 pm
It looks like the poor box office performance in the United States has resulted in the release being delayed for the UK (and I presume the rest of Europe).
Totally agree on that one. Jackie Brown is his best film by far and one of the great films of the 1990s. I see Kill Bill and Grindhouse as a boy playing with his big toys and having fun rather than anything awe-inspiring or anywhere close to the level of artistic perfection he achieved with Jackie Brown.davidhare wrote:All I can say about this is that I dont think he's made a decent movie since Jackie Brown so WADDAFUCK.
Are you forgetting the fact that they smashed two cars into each other head-on, that there were numerous vehicular stunts, and things like giant billboards of Jungle Julia in the background of several scenes?Narshty wrote:It still boggles my mind that Death Proof could cost $30 million or so when Pulp Fiction (much longer, bigger flashier cast, more locations, etc.) only cost $8 million. How on earth does that work?
What about QT's salary?Barmy wrote:DP had no actors worth a salary other than Kurt R and Rosario D. The rest are nobodys. The film has little CGI. Driving around in two cars--how much can that cost? If this cost $30M, how much will QT's WWII flick cost?
Dawson Upset with 'Death Proof' Rape Scene
By WENN | Wednesday, April 04, 2007
HOLLYWOOD - Rosario Dawson challenged moviemaker Quentin Tarantino on the set of her new movie Death Proof after he made her character leave a friend to get raped.
The feminist actress admits she had huge problems with the scene because she felt one woman wouldn't leave another behind if she felt she was in harm's way--but controlling Tarantino refused to listen to her complaints.
Dawson says, "I talked to Quentin about it several times, because I had a huge problem with leaving her there: 'I don't leave that girl behind; I love that girl, we're friends.'
"Quentin says, 'No,' (and) I say, 'Can I throw her the keys to the car?' and he says, 'No, you can't, that's not how it's going to work.' I was like, 'Damn!'"
Costar Rose McGowan also tasted Tarantino's controlling nature: "I couldn't change the word 'the'."
It's a bit over-the-top to be calling it a "rape scene;" and although the 'joke' is obviously meant to centre on the suggestion of possible violation, be it rape or otherwise, at the same time, such suggestions are as much assumptions on the audience's part. We assume it must be sexual violation in part because, well, we're working on the stereotype of a blue-collar, over-all wearing mechanic. Whether or not Tarantino is playing on that or his sense of humour is just basely juvenile, I can't say, although I am sure what side certain members on here will take.Barmy wrote:I guess I don't see how DP cost almost as much as PT. Robert Rodriguez deserves at least as much salary as QT.
Dawson Upset with 'Death Proof' Rape Scene
By WENN | Wednesday, April 04, 2007
HOLLYWOOD - Rosario Dawson challenged moviemaker Quentin Tarantino on the set of her new movie Death Proof after he made her character leave a friend to get raped.
The feminist actress admits she had huge problems with the scene because she felt one woman wouldn't leave another behind if she felt she was in harm's way--but controlling Tarantino refused to listen to her complaints.
Dawson says, "I talked to Quentin about it several times, because I had a huge problem with leaving her there: 'I don't leave that girl behind; I love that girl, we're friends.'
"Quentin says, 'No,' (and) I say, 'Can I throw her the keys to the car?' and he says, 'No, you can't, that's not how it's going to work.' I was like, 'Damn!'"
Costar Rose McGowan also tasted Tarantino's controlling nature: "I couldn't change the word 'the'."
Quentin Tarantino: I'm proud of my flop
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/04/2007
Undaunted by the US box-office failure of his latest film, Quentin Tarantino can't wait to unveil a new, souped-up version at Cannes. He talks to John Hiscock
The hard-core Quentin Tarantino fans who lined up to see the much-anticipated Grindhouse on its opening weekend in the US seemed delighted with the filmmaker's £30 million homage to exploitation films. But, to everyone's surprise, it was the least successful opening of any of Tarantino's films in the past decade.
Quentin Tarantino (right) and Robert Rodriguez
Double trouble: Quentin Tarantino (right) and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he made B-movie tribute film Grindhouse
It seems too few people wanted to see an ode to a largely extinct form of cheap, sex-and-violence filled movies popular in the 1950s and '60s. Especially one that consists of two different films back to back.
In some countries, the films will be shown separately. In Britain, as in the US, the plan was originally to show them as a double feature. Now, however, the film has been pulled from the schedules while the distributors work out what to do with it. "It will definitely be released here, but we don't know in what form," they say.
"Oh, it was disappointing," says Tarantino of the poor opening weekend when I meet him in Beverly Hills. "It was disappointing, yeah." Then he brightens and laughs. "But the movie worked with the audience."
He should know. He had spent the weekend driving around Los Angeles area in his yellow-and-black Mustang, seeing the film eight times in different cinemas to gauge audience reaction.
advertisement
"People who saw it loved it and applauded, but maybe a lot of people just didn't want to see two movies," he says.
Grindhouse, which has taken just £12 million at the US box office in the three weeks since it opened, consists of two bloody, 85-minute movies: Planet Terror, by Sin City director Robert Rodriguez, a long-time Tarantino collaborator, and Death Proof from Tarantino himself.
Planet Terror stars Rose McGowan as an exotic dancer whose career is cut short when her right leg is eaten by flesh-craving zombies, and she is fitted with a machine-gun prosthetic. Death Proof, which stars Kurt Russell as a psycho stunt-driver, is Tarantino's "slasher" film, except the slasher uses a car to kill young women instead of a knife.
To make the film look authentically B-grade, Tarantino and Rodriguez scratched the prints and edited out "missing reels". They also included fake exploitation-movie trailers directed by pals Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth to run during the "intermission".
For those countries where Death Proof will be released separately, Tarantino plans to add 30 minutes he had to edit out. "There is half-an-hour's difference between my Death Proof and what is playing in Grindhouse," he says. "I wrote my script - I couldn't be prouder of my script - then I had to shrink it way down to fit inside this double feature.
"I was like a brutish American exploitation distributor who cut the movie down almost to the point of incoherence. I cut it down to the bone and took all the fat off it to see if it could still exist, and it worked. It works great as a double feature, but I'm just as excited if not more excited about actually having the world see Death Proof unfiltered."
It is hard not to marvel at the 44-year-old filmmaker's constant enthusiasm. He talks so rapidly that his words seem to tumble out on top of each other in stream-of-consciousness monologues that are liberally sprinkled with the names of obscure, B-movie directors and exploitation films long forgotten by nearly everyone but himself.
A film fan from the time he could talk and walk, Tarantino has an encyclopaedic knowledge of movies that most experts have never even heard of, and he likes nothing better than to talk at length about them.
He has an almost touching faith in his own abilities and is incapable of believing his own movies are anything but flawless. Like a child looking forward to Christmas, he is eagerly anticipating Death Proof having its solo première at the Cannes film festival.
"I can't wait for it to première," he says. "It will be in competition, and it'll be the first time everyone sees Death Proof by itself, including me."
The idea for Grindhouse came when Rodriguez was at Tarantino's house and saw a poster for a 1957 double bill of Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night. He mentioned that he had always wanted to do a double feature. Tarantino instantly came up with the name Grindhouse, and a movie was born.
Tarantino and Rodriguez, who met at the Toronto Film Festival in 1992, have been occasional collaborators ever since Tarantino played a drug dealer in Rodriguez's Desperado in 1995.
He was the executive producer, writer and co-star of Rodriguez's vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, and he also directed a segment of Sin City, while Rodriguez composed some of the music for Tarantino's Kill Bill.
advertisement
"I can't imagine doing Grindhouse with any other director in the way me and Robert did it because I just had complete faith and trust in him," says Tarantino. "So much so that we didn't actually see each other's movie completed until three weeks before the film opened. It was as if we worked in little vacuums and cut our movies down, and then put them together and watched it all play, and then made a couple of little changes after that, and pretty much that was it."
Critics' reviews were mostly enthusiastic, but Daily Variety asked: "Did anyone besides Tarantino and Rodriguez ever really care about the grindhouse movie genre that much to begin with?"
Tarantino cares passionately; and, probably not coincidentally, at the time Grindhouse was released, he was supervising an eight-week "grindhouse festival" at a Los Angeles cinema, featuring deliriously bad films from his collection, including what he says is one of his all-time favourites, The Girl From Starship Venus by the British sexploitation director Derek Ford, which he programmed as part of a double bill with The Legend of the Wolf Woman.
The festival was a great success with Tarantino fans, who revere his dual status as the film geek who made good and the reigning avatar of postmodern cool.
Raised by his mother in a Los Angeles suburb, Tarantino dropped out of school and took a job as a salesman in a video store, where he brushed up on his already-voluminous knowledge of martial arts and B movies.
He worked as a production assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise video, and with a friend, Roger Avary, he wrote the screenplay for Reservoir Dogs, which marked his debut as writer-director-actor.
They followed that with screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers and then Tarantino returned to the director's chair for Pulp Fiction, which won him more than a dozen major awards.
He adapted Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, and turned it into the 1997 film Jackie Brown. Then he dropped out of sight, making "Where's Quentin?" a Hollywood catchphrase, until he returned with the two-part martial arts comedy-thriller Kill Bill.
"I think I've gotten more technically proficient as a filmmaker because you can't help but do that," he says. "Having gone through the pre-production, production and post-production processes, you kind of know how to do it now; it's not a gigantic mystery any more. Maybe that's one of the reasons that, from Jackie Brown on, I've always tackled things I didn't know how to do, so I could learn how to do them."
He is unmarried but is seldom short of female company. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend Grace Lovelace in 1995 and spent two years with Mira Sorvino. He also dated director Allison Anders and comedienne Margaret Cho.
But as a friend said: "It takes a pretty special kind of girl to give up her life to watch kung fu movies with him for a year and a half."
Although he has shaped a pop-culture persona as big as his films, Tarantino is not among the most prolific of moviemakers, averaging one film every three years or so.
"I want to make movies. I have to make movies," he says. "The reason I don't make more movies is that I want to live life in between. I give it all to the movies, and it's like I'm climbing Mount Everest every time. When I get off the mountain then I want to be able to enjoy some time in the chalet at the bottom.
"When I make a movie it's an adventure, but when I get through with it then I get back to my friends I've put on hold for a year. The opposite sex, adventurous travel, sleeping late, watching mindless television, reading a novel, trying to go to sleep at night - they all become very appealing again.
"But the real, real reason I don't make more movies is that I'm a writer, and I always have to start with the blank page and that's hard. You are starting from scratch every single time. Nothing you've done before means a damn when you've got to start all over again."
advertisement
His next project will be Inglorious Bastards, a Second World War film he has been working on for several years and which he calls his "Dirty Dozen, men-on-a-mission movie".
Having already paid homage to martial arts, revenge, slasher, Japanese and road-rage movies, Tarantino is also planning a new genre, a form of spaghetti western set in America's Deep South which he calls "a southern".
"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done," he says. "I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.
"But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it. So maybe that's the next mountain waiting for me."
It's a safe bet that his "southern" will also include homages to several other movie genres.
"Look at my movies and there's usually at least three genres operating on all cylinders, bumping into each other," he says. "It's like I don't know if I'm going to make a tremendous amount of movies, so I keep trying to knock off three movies with each one I do."
Oh man, that Margaret Cho comment made my day.Barmy wrote:QT dated Maggie Cho? I guess that's proof he's gay. And it's scary to think that 30 minutes of "fat" (as QT called it) were cut out of DP. This guy is delusional.
Quel surprise.Barmy wrote:Harry Knowles LOVED DEATH PROOF!!!!
I guess Drew's finally back, considering...DrewReiber wrote:I'm sorry if this is not more specific, but proving something others can see for themselves isn't worth my going through and creating specific shot comparisons.
DrewReiber wrote:That's some serious reaching if I've ever seen it. I assume that the relationship between El Wray and Cherry Darling is a reference to the Star Wars prequels. ...backup your statements with actual arguments.exte wrote:The bomb going off between the two guys: Aliens. The truck crashing through the building/glass: T1 & T2. The hanging from the helicopter. True Lies. There's a lot more, but I'm tired and can't remember.
Perhaps that's because I've seen the Terminator films and I've seen Planet Terror. Your ability to take that generalized claim any further died due to your own lack of support and an approach to discussion that rarely digs deeper than the past 20 years of movies. I know you're still burning with passive aggressiveness that you can't get anywhere, but that doesn't change the fact you're trying to defend a guy who only supports every argument ever made about him with his statements, actions and filmmaking.exte wrote:I guess Drew's finally back, considering...
There is a God.Some new material has been added, most notably a lap dance performed by Vanessa Ferlito for Kurt Russell and a scene in and around a rural convenience store where copies of Film Comment are prominently displayed on the magazine rack.
It's strange to note that the car chase is exactly the same when Tarantino went had previously hoped to extend the scene when he first started talking about bringing Death Proof to Cannes. Also, the French title of the film -- Le Boulevard De Mort -- has a lot more zing.The new Death Proof has a lot more talk, though unfortunately, no more rock than its original version. The climactic car chase, which lasts about a half-hour, is exactly the same, but more of the scenes of girl talk are included. There's also a raunchy lap-dance sequence, and a new black and white section, set in a convenience-store parking lot. Finally, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who enjoys crashing into carloads of young women, is now an aspiring filmmaker, who makes videos of his victims.