Big Things

~ Live & Learn

Quentin Tarantino

“I remember reading a review that Pauline Kael wrote about some director’s big epic, and she said: Now, look, it might seem unfair to judge a talented man more harshly when he tries to do something big than a less talented person who’s doing something easier. But when you try big things, you take big risks, and if you’re trying to do something that is maybe above you and you can’t quite pull off, then whereas before we only saw your gifts, now we see your failings.

I’ve always been pushing that envelope. I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.”

~ Quentin Tarantino

“Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1963.  In junior high he attended drama classes and he actually dropped out of High School at age 15 to attend acting classes full-time at the James Best theater company.  After he left the acting school he became an employee at the Video Archives, a now-defunct movie rental store in Manhattan. It was there that he began to truly think about and discuss cinema as he worked with customers to find the best movie for them. He actually credits that store as providing the inspiration for him to become a director by saying that ‘When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’  Tarantino is the famed director of classics ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Inglorious Basterds.'” (Source: ID Poster)

Sources: Image and bio – ID Poster.  Quote: 99u.com via New York Times story: Quentin’s World

8 thoughts on “Big Things”

  4. Tarantino is a magician. How effortlessly and ebulliently he conjures up works that transcend the disreputableness of the genres they belong to an wow his audiences by making something special yet capturing the true essence and pattern of the genre. Who else could have made Django Unchained, a Spaghetti Western the way Tarantino did?

    If someone like say Spielberg (whom I hold high respect for) made Django, he would have modified everything about the genre to make the film work for awards. Tarantino, on the other hand, retains much of what you used to see in those cheesy old Spaghetti Western films and then works to optimize it using his own dexterity and knowledge of films. He takes risks and then pisses on the faces of those who say he’ll fail by delivering great films one after the other.

    My personal favorite will remain Kill Bill Vol 1, then Django Unchained and Kill Bill Vol 2, then Pulp Fiction (liked it less the second time I saw it), and then maybe his segment in Grindhouse.

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