When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’
Don’t write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what’s in your heart.
I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It’s all language, it’s all communication.
There`s only one list that`s more illustrious than the list of directors who won the Palme d`Or. It`s the list of directors who didn`t.
I’m basically like, you know, learned pretty quickly the guy who throws the first punch usually wins, so when people gave me a hard time I just punched them.
In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.
Sure, Kill Bill is a violent movie. But it’s a Tarantino movie. You don’t go to see Metallica and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.
If you want to make a movie, make it. Don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.
The good ideas will survive.
I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it – if my work has anything it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don’t like that, then tough titty, don’t go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don’t do homages.
It’s a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody’s arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.
Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It’s just another colour to work with.
I’m very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I’ve never really considered myself a writer.
I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don’t like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.
If you love cinema as much as I do, and not many people do, and if you are focused and actually have something to offer, you will get somewhere with it.
I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t.
As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.
When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.
It’s nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.
You can’t write poetry on the computer.
I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them. It’s my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.
Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room… I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I’m looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.
