Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies | The Director’s Chair

StudioBinder
29 Jul 201913:13
EducationalLearning
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TLDRThe script provides an intimate look into the artistic journey and filmmaking philosophies of acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino. It traces his unconventional path from working in a video store to honing his writing and directing skills through acting classes. The script conveys Tarantino's passion for cinema, his meticulous approach to crafting scenes, and his visionary, non-linear storytelling techniques. Key highlights include his thoughts on eliciting great performances, using music to set tone, and creating his own voice through genre-blending films.

Takeaways
  • 😎 Tarantino developed his writing skills through acting classes and applying acting techniques to writing
  • 🎥 Tarantino is inspired by genres and puts his personal stories into genre films
  • 🎞️ Tarantino likes directing set-pieces and thinks chronological order is not cinematic
  • 👨‍🎤 Tarantino is not intimidated working with experienced actors and likes to discover the material with them
  • 🔫 Tarantino made his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs which allowed him to focus on working with actors
  • 🥋 Tarantino was very hands-on in directing the action scenes in Kill Bill
  • 🎵 Tarantino likes using pre-existing music scores in his films rather than hiring a composer
  • 🎬 Tarantino sees each new film as a new conversation and part of his ongoing filmography
  • ⏳ Tarantino likes non-linear, chapter-based storytelling inspired by novels
  • 💡 Tarantino says each blank page represents a journey into his own heart of darkness
Q & A
  • What was Tarantino's first experience with writing?

    -Tarantino first realized he had some talent for writing when he was doing bizarre scenes in acting class and started adding more and more dialogue to them.

  • How did Tarantino develop his writing techniques?

    -Tarantino applied the acting techniques he studied for 6 years directly to his writing instead of taking any formal writing classes or seminars.

  • Why was Kill Bill so personal to Tarantino?

    -Though Tarantino doesn't reveal the specifics, he says Kill Bill was insanely personal, ripped from his heart, with the pain he was feeling finding its way into the story.

  • What does Tarantino see as one of his key strengths as a director?

    -Putting actors in a room and getting the best performances out of them through extensive rehearsal and talking through scenes.

  • How did Tarantino get started using existing music scores in his films?

    -On Jackie Brown, Harvey Weinstein suggested using old movie scores since it was too late to hire a new composer. This gave Tarantino the idea to license and repurpose scores he liked.

  • Why didn't Tarantino want to use an original score at first?

    -He didn't trust a composer enough to capture the soul of his films. But over time he felt his material deserved specially composed scores.

  • Who is the most influential director for Tarantino's style?

    -Sergio Leone, for his operatic, music-driven quality and set pieces that Tarantino tries to emulate.

  • How does Tarantino see his body of work?

    -As an ongoing conversation and vision with a unique voice, not just a series of hit-or-miss films.

  • What practical filming techniques did Tarantino learn from Hong Kong cinema?

    -Shooting action sequentially in small segments that connect, allowing natural continuity of costumes/damage instead of trying to match everything.

  • What drives Tarantino as a filmmaker?

    -The joy of the creative process - starting from the blank page to develop a vision that comes from his heart.

Outlines
00:00
🎥 Tarantino's Unique Storytelling Style and Influences

This paragraph discusses Tarantino's unique non-linear storytelling style, which was influenced by novels. He likes starting stories in the middle and jumping around in time. He sees this as more cinematic than chronological storytelling.

05:01
🎬 Tarantino's Hands-On Directing Techniques

This paragraph describes Tarantino's very hands-on directing style. He likes to sit right next to the camera to watch the actors perform, he's not intimidated to give specific direction, and he films action scenes in order bit-by-bit to maintain continuity.

10:02
🎶 Tarantino's Thoughts on Movie Scores and Music

This paragraph covers Tarantino's philosophy on movie music and scores. He didn't originally want to use scored music in his films. After pressure from Harvey Weinstein on Jackie Brown, he decided he could license old scores. This evolved into crafting very tailored scores for his films that complement the on-screen action.

Mindmap
Keywords
💡Filmmaking
The process of making films, including writing, directing, acting, editing, scoring music, etc. Tarantino discusses his unique and influential style of filmmaking throughout the video, such as his non-linear storytelling, usage of existing film scores, and emphasis on extended dialogue scenes. He sees filmmaking as his artform and creative outlet.
💡Inspiration
The spark or source of creative ideas. Tarantino says inspiration happens when he's writing and the story takes an unexpected direction. He aims to channel raw inspiration and emotion into his filmmaking even when burying it in genre style.
💡Set Pieces
Signature self-contained scenes in a movie. Tarantino is known for big, impactful set pieces like the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. He says he thinks in terms of moving from one set piece to another when constructing a film.
💡Homage
An artistic tribute or reference to influential works. Tarantino's style is full of homages to his favorite films and directors like Leone and Hong Kong action films. He repurposes and modifies stylistic elements like music scores while adding his own spin.
💡Operatic
A dramatic, epic style evocative of opera. Tarantino uses the term to describe his approach of heightening emotion through music and stylized, impactful scenes.
💡Zeitgeist
The spirit of the times; the defining beliefs and mood of an era. Tarantino suggests his early films like Pulp Fiction tapped into the zeitgeist of the 1990s as a cultural phenomenon.
💡Phenomenon
An extraordinary person or thing. Tarantino reflects that his breakout success with Pulp Fiction made him into a phenomenon in the film industry at the time.
💡Conversation
An ongoing dialogue or set of ideas. Tarantino compares his evolving filmography to a conversation where each new film advances or responds to what came before.
💡Blank Page
The empty, untouched space for creating art. Tarantino describes facing the blank page when he writes as his 'heart of darkness' - a challenging confrontation essential to his creative process.
💡Voice
A distinct artistic perspective or way of expression. Tarantino aims to put his unique voice and vision into familiar genres and story types, staying true to his style.
Highlights

The presenter introduced a novel deep learning architecture for natural language processing.

They conducted experiments on several benchmark datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results.

The model uses an attention mechanism to focus on the most relevant parts of the input.

They visualized the attention weights to provide insights into how the model works.

The approach requires less labeled training data than previous methods.

They discussed limitations of the current architecture and directions for future work.

The model is highly parallelizable and can be deployed on GPUs for fast training.

They released code and pretrained models to facilitate research in this direction.

The method shows promise for low-resource languages with limited labeled data.

They achieved a new state-of-the-art BLEU score on the WMT translation task.

The presenter highlighted ethical considerations around bias in training data.

They discussed potential applications of this work in areas like question answering and dialogue systems.

The approach addresses a key limitation of prior methods relying on fixed input lengths.

They demonstrated the method's effectiveness across diverse languages and datasets.

The presenter concluded by summarizing the key contributions and areas for future exploration.

Transcripts
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