Tarantino Bites Back Quentin Tarantino tackles Nick James about the negative comments Death Proof received in Sight & Sound Nick James: So how's it going? Quentin Tarantino: I was feeling a little slighted by Sight & Sound because I realised that I hadn't done an interview. But then you guys came out with this stuff [the Grindhouse cover story, June 2007] really, really early. We used to reach you through your PR agency and that ended. So I think we lost our contact. That makes sense, but now it's re-established. Absolutely. I've done an interview with S&S for every one of my movies, all the way through Kill Bill I at least. And they've always been good. Yeah. I love the magazine Thank you. Did I tell you about this pub [our interview venue, The Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place, London]? It has a big literary reputation Someone told me Dylan Thomas used to write here Dylan Thomas, Patrick Hamilton, George Orwell - all these people used to drink here in the 30s. This area is Fitzrovia. They all used to hang out here. I must make an appointment to write a chapter of Inglorious Bastards here, just for history's sake. How is 'Inglorious Bastards' going? I've got tons of material and a lot of stuff written but now I've figured out what to do, I gotta start from page one, square one. I started just before I came on this trip and brought the stuff with me but I haven't had a chance to continue yet. But maybe on the flight back home I'll come back into it. I love writing in other countries. It's a lot of fun So let's take it back to the point where, you are coming up with the idea [for 'Death Proof']. I'm interested in your reflections as to how it's turned out - originally it was part of the Grindhouse package and then it was divided from it - and how you feel about that. And maybe take me back to the moment when you first conceived it? I'd done Kill Bill and I wanted a little bit more time before I climbed my next Mount Everest. I ended up doing the CSI episode, shot in about 14 days but that doesn't mean it wasn't really hard work. It almost counted to me like I had made another movie. I was just preparing to start thinking about Inglorious Bastards. And Robert Rodriguez came over to my house, and he saw I had an old AIP double feature poster of the Roger Corman movie Rock All Night and the film Dragstrip Girl. And he goes: "You see that double feature poster you have on the wall there? I always wanted to do a double feature movie." And he was thinking about doing both of them himself. And I go, "Hey! That would be cool." And he says, "Well the let's do it. You do the one, and I'll do the other." He had a zombie movie he had already written 30 pages of around the time of The Faculty. We envisioned this being a franchise. It would be fun to keep going back to it - another one could be a spaghetti western or sexploitation or whatever. But we decided it would be better if they were two horror films. I had just got through reinvestigating the slasher films, so they were fresh in my mind. And it was supposed to be an easy project, to do his film in Austin and then I wouldn't even have to crew up. I'd be working in Robert's studio, and Robert's like, "My studio is your studio; my crew is your crew." So then I started thinking about what I could do. And the first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there's a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by fucking him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to fuck white women. And that was the devil's punishment. The opening scene would take place in the classroom, with the professor telling the story of Jody the Grinder in a big four-page monologue. I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part. And it was really good. But then I didn't have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher films, then even if he's doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave's side? And then it hit me - and actually this was one of the things that was really funny in the Sight & Sound review - "Death Proof in no way resembles the kind of genre movie that used to be projected until it fell to pieces in the fleapits of America" (S&S, October 2007). In answer to that - and this is something I said to myself when I was coming up with the story - I never do proper genre movies. It's like using the fact that Reservoir Dogs isn't a proper heist film even though it fits in the genre, as a slag against it. And what is so good about slasher films is they are all the same. This is why they are so much fun to write subtextual film criticism about, because all your arguments really work for a vast majority of films. And if you try to monkey about just a little too much with it then now you're not even really making a slasher film. But if you are intentionally setting out to make something that - let's put quotes around it - is "trashy or bad" I don't think slasher films are trashy or bad But you know what I mean? I know what you mean. But I don't think I agree. Because you reference films of the past, where you're deliberately doing slightly hokey things I disagree with that! Well, maybe I'm wrong I'm not saying you are wrong. But I'm disagreeing with the way you keep wording it because if I'm trying to do a remembrance of the films of the past, the slasher film is a legitimate subgenre in horror film. Well that sounds a lot different to making a reference to films of the past. But there was a feeling about Grindhouse that it was nostalgic and when you look back at, say, Russ Meyer's films, there is a slight hokiness to them Let me address that 100 per cent because I don't think there was any hokeyness in Death Proof when I wrote it. If you are thinking that some moment is cheesy or some moment is hokey, I didn't mean it to be that way. But here's my point though. What you are referring to isn't any of the material inside of the movie or anything that happens inside the movie, it's just the print. That's all it is. It's a Godardian thing. We can argue that slasher films aren't a proper genre. No, I just meant hokey in conventional terms of what is or isn't regarded as good acting. Well, if anyone thinks what I put in there was bad acting, I didn't mean to. I was just interested in the process of your thinking about making a Grindhouse double bill. Did you never think, well, I gotta make it slightly more clumsy here to make it more authentic? Most of the clumsiness was done in the editing room. But we did have this fun mantra that we could say on the set that anytime something didn't quite work or we didn't film just the right kind of transition, or there was a piece of equipment in the shot, "Hey! That's Grindhouse." And all that was accidental? That's accidental and it just added to the thing. Then I remembered a time when I told somebody I was thinking about getting a safer car. I was thinking about a Volvo and he says, "Oh, Quentin, if you want a safer car all you have to do is buy any car and give it to a stunt team plus $10,000 and they'll make it death proof. And for two seconds I actually thought about doing that. He actually used the words "death proof" but I forgot about it - this was 11 years ago. So now I'm thinking about this tale, and I thought, what if he uses a car? And what if his thing is to follow girls who travel in a posse? His car wipes the girls out and he gets to live, because it is death proof. To me he was a sex act, so what he was doing was a rape murder, his act of sex. He does it in such a way that it looks like an accident so he gets away with it. Then we wait until he recovers and, like a serial killer, he goes to another state and does it again. All that made me work out how he got to be Stuntman Mike. Have you always wanted to do a car chase film? I don't know if I wanted to do a car chase film.