lundi 23 décembre 2019

Listen to The Hollywood Reporter's Full Cinematographer Roundtable on 'Behind the Screen'


The full conversation from The Hollywood Reporter's 2019 Cinematographer Roundtable is now available as a special episode of THR's Behind the Screen.
Recorded Sept. 29 in downtown Los Angeles, the conversation features Roger Deakins (1917 and The Goldfinch), Natasha Braier (Honey Boy), Cesar Charlone (The Two Popes), Caleb Deschanel (The Lion King), Rodrigo Prieto (The Irishman) and Robert Richardson (Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood).

Ici 

'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood': What Quentin Tarantino Left in the Editing Room


Fred Raskin had a big challenge on his hands. The first cut of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was more than four and a half hours long, and he had to cut it down to almost half that length.
Luckily for the film editor, Tarantino joined him in the editing room after principal photography, already knowing what half of the cuts should be.
The rest, Raskin says, "came from watching the movie over and over again [while considering] that if we lose something, do we upset the balance of how much time we are spending with each character and do we need to move things around?"
In the end, Raskin — who also edited Tarantino's The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained — managed to hone down Once Upon a Time to 2 hours and 40 minutes. But the loss of about two hours of footage meant that he really had to kill some darlings.
Some of the scenes left on the cutting room floor centered on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he's shooting the Western series Lancer and encounters the precocious child actor Trudi, played by a scene-stealing Julia Butters. "Her two scenes [in the final cut] with Leo are so strong, we realized we didn't need the other stuff," says Raskin.

mardi 17 décembre 2019

Filmmaker of the Year Quentin Tarantino on Finding the Right Story, What Streaming is Missing, and His 10th Film


Quentin Tarantino needs to wake up. It’s early Monday morning at New York’s Langham Hotel, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter and veteran filmmaker is putting together a cup of coffee. He’s also nursing a glass of Coca-Cola. It’s a busy one. Only an hour prior, his ninth film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, nabbed five Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. This isn’t surprising, though. The dreamy drama has been a critical darling since it swept into theaters this past July, and dazzled the box office. If anything, it’s just the beginning.
His competition is stiff. Tarantino is going headfirst into an awards season that includes legendary veterans like Martin Scorsese, foreign visionaries such as Bong Joon-ho, and fellow colleagues in Noah Baumbach and Sam Mendes. Like Tarantino, they’re all campaigning with intensely introspective works, the type of pictures that say more about the filmmaker than the stories on the celluloid. It’s been that kind of year, and should make for an intriguing season as we trudge through the snow in the lead-up to the Oscars, one full of rousing victories, unlikely upsets, and endless chatter.
Right now, though, Tarantino is enjoying the calm amidst the lingering storm. Sure, he’s exhausted — who isn’t at this hour of the week — but he’s hardly fatigued. If we’re being honest, he sounds satisfied. There’s a resolve in his demeanor that’s less Rick Dalton and more Cliff Booth. “It is what it is,” to borrow from Scorsese’s The Irishman, and the “is” ain’t too fucking bad. As he tells me late into our chat, “In a strange way, it seems like this movie, Hollywood, would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement.” He’s not wrong.

dimanche 15 décembre 2019

Once Upon a Time… : pourquoi l’apparition de Steve McQueen résume tout le film de Quentin Tarantino


Il est l’un des visages connus que l’on croise dans Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, la fresque cinéphile signée Quentin Tarantino : Steve McQueen fait en effet une apparition remarquée au détour d’une scène, incarné pour l’occasion par un Damian Lewis bluffant de ressemblance avec l’acteur légendaire des Sept Mercenaires. Cette apparition clin d’oeil n’est toutefois pas un simple plaisir cinéphile, puisqu’elle offre au contraire  au long métrage plusieurs niveaux de lecture supplémentaires.

vendredi 13 décembre 2019

Chicago Film Critics Association Awards


MILOS STEHLIK BREAKTHROUGH FILMMAKER AWARD
Mati Diop, Atlantics
Alma Har’el, Honey Boy
Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Lulu Wang, The Farewell
Olivia Wilde, Booksmart

MOST PROMISING PERFORMER
Julia Butters, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Roman Griffin Davis, Jojo Rabbit
Julia Fox, Uncut Gems
Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale
Taylor Russell, Waves

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins, 1917
Jarin Blaschke, The Lighthouse
Robert Richardson, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Hong Kyung Pyo, Parasite
Claire Mathon, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Thomas Newman, 1917
Alexandre Desplat, Little Women
Randy Newman, Marriage Story
Daniel Lopatin, Uncut Gems
Michael Abels, Us

BEST ART DIRECTION
1917
Knives Out
Little Women
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Parasite

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Dolemite is My Name
Little Women
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Rocketman

BEST USE OF VISUAL EFFECTS
1917
Ad Astra
Avengers: Endgame
The Irishman
Midsommar

BEST EDITING
1917
The Irishman
Little Women
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Uncut Gems

BEST ANIMATED FILM
Frozen 2
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
I Lost My Body
Missing Link
Toy Story 4

BEST DOCUMENTARY
American Factory
Apollo 11
For Sama
Hail Satan?
Honeyland

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
The Farewell
Pain and Glory
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Transit

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Farewell by Lulu Wang
Knives Out by Rian Johnson
Marriage Story by Noah Baumbach
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
Parasite by Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin Won

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster
Hustlers by Lorene Scafaria
The Irishman by Steven Zaillian
Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi
Little Women by Greta Gerwig

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Shia Labeouf, Honey Boy
Al Pacino, The Irishman
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cho Yeo Jeong, Parasite
Laura Dern, Marriage Story
Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers
Florence Pugh, Little Women
Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell

BEST ACTOR
Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory
Robert De Niro, The Irishman
Adam Driver, Marriage Story
Joaquin Phoenix, Joker
Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems

BEST ACTRESS
Awkwafina, The Farewell
Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story
Elisabeth Moss, Her Smell
Lupita Nyong’o, Us
Renée Zellweger, Judy

BEST DIRECTOR
Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Bong Joon Ho, Parasite
Greta Gerwig, Little Women
Martin Scorsese, The Irishman
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

BEST PICTURE
The Irishman
Little Women
Marriage Story
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Parasite

mercredi 11 décembre 2019

Kill Bill Vol.3 dans trois ans?


A chaque micro tendu, la question est inévitable. Et maintenant, quels sont tes projets QT? Et ton dixième film? Tarantino a dit vouloir prendre son temps avant le 10ème long métrage et vouloir s'exprimer par d'autres biais: une pièce de théâtre, un roman et une série TV western. Ce qui devrait l'occuper pendant 2-3 ans. Mais après...

“I just had dinner with Uma Thurman last night. We were at a really cool Japanese restaurant. I do have an idea of what I would do with [‘Kill Bill Vol. 3’]. That was the whole thing, conquering the concept. What has happened to The Bride since then? And what do I want to do?”

“I didn’t just want to come up with some cockamamie adventure. [The character] doesn’t deserve that. The Bride has fought long and hard. I have an idea now that could be interesting. I still wouldn’t do it for a little bit. It would be at least three years from now. It is definitely in the cards.”

mardi 10 décembre 2019

Golden Globes 2020: les nominations


Cinq nominations aux Golden Globes pour OUATIH: meilleur film (comédie?), meilleur réalisateur, meilleur scénario original, meilleur acteur et meilleur second rôle, qui aura fort à faire face aux deux favoris de Netflix, The Irishman et Marriage Story.

jeudi 5 décembre 2019

NY Film Critics Circle 2019 Awards


Nouveau baromètre pour la saison des prix, ce sont les journalistes et professionnels du cinéma de New-York qui ont rendu leur verdict. Tarantino repart ici avec le prix du meilleur scénario:

Best Picture: “The Irishman”
Best Director: The Safdie Brothers, ‘Uncut Gems’
Best Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”
Best Actress: Lupita Nyong’o, “Us”
Best Actor: Antonio Banderas, “Pain and Glory”
Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern, “Marriage Story” and “Little Women”
Best Supporting Actor: Joe Pesci, “The Irishman”
Best Cinematography: “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Claire Mathon
Best Non-Fiction Film: “Honeyland,” Tamara Kotevska and Ljubo Stefanov
Best Foreign Language Film: “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho
Best Animated Feature: “I Lost My Body,” Jérémy Clapin
Best First Film: “Atlantics,”  Mati Diop
Special Awards: Indie Collect, Randy Newman

OUATIH: Sortie DVD + Blu-Ray


mercredi 4 décembre 2019

National Board of Review 2019


Following the Gotham Awards naming Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” the best film of the year, the National Board of Review (NBR) has now weighed in with its picks for the best movies and performances of 2019. The NBR is made up of film enthusiasts, industry professionals, academics, and filmmakers. The group is one of the first organizations to announce its end-of-the-year selections, followed closely by the New York Film Critics Circle and the American Film Institute (both announcing tomorrow, December 4).

Last year, the National Board of Review honored “Green Book” with its top prize. That film controversially went on to win the Best Picture Oscar over “Roma” earlier this year. Nearly every NBR winner for Best Film this decade has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, including “The Post,” “Manchester by the Sea,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”


Other 2018 NBR winners included Viggo Mortensen for Best Actor (“Green Book”), Lady Gaga for Best Actress (“A Star Is Born”), Sam Elliott for Best Supporting Actor (“A Star Is Born”), and Regina King for Best Supporting Actress (“If Beale Street Could Talk”). All of these actors went on to earn Oscar nominations and King even won the Supporting Actress prize.


The full list of 2019 National Board of Review winners is below.

Best Film: THE IRISHMAN
Best Director: Quentin Tarantino, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
Best Actor: Adam Sandler, UNCUT GEMS
Best Actress: Renée Zellweger, JUDY
Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
Best Supporting Actress: Kathy Bates, RICHARD JEWELL
Best Original Screenplay: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein, UNCUT GEMS
Best Adapted Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, THE IRISHMAN
Breakthrough Performance: Paul Walter Hauser, RICHARD JEWELL
Best Directorial Debut: Melina Matsoukas, QUEEN & SLIM
Best Animated Feature: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD
Best Foreign Language Film: PARASITE
Best Documentary: MAIDEN
Best Ensemble: KNIVES OUT
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Roger Deakins, 1917
NBR Icon Award: Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino
NBR Freedom of Expression Award: FOR SAMA
NBR Freedom of Expression Award: JUST MERCY

Top Films (in alphabetical order)
“1917”
“Dolemite is My Name”
“Ford v Ferrari”
“Jojo Rabbit”
“Knives Out”
“Marriage Story”
“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”
“Richard Jewell”
“Uncut Gems”
“Waves”

Top 5 Foreign Language Films (in alphabetical order)
“Atlantics”
“Invisible Life”
“Pain and Glory”
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”
“Transit”

Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order)
“American Factory”
“Apollo 11”
“The Black Godfather”
“Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese”
“Wrestle”

Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order)
“The Farewell”
“Give Me Liberty”
“A Hidden Life”
“Judy”
“The Last Black Man in San Francisco”
“Midsommar”
The Nightingale”
“The Peanut Butter Falcon”
“The Souvenir”
“Wild Rose”

Source: Indiewire

OUATIH Production Design Vignette


vendredi 29 novembre 2019

Fucking Black Friday


Alfred, Quentin et Pedro sont sur un plateau...


A la manière de Où est Charlie ?, Alexandre Clérisse réalise un superbe livre-jeu spécial cinéma. A travers 56 pages, il convoque les plus grands réalisateurs. De Tim Burton à Jacques Tati, en passant par Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Michel Gondry, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Pedro Almodovar, les frères Coen, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino et Charlie Chaplin.
Ils sont tous là, les 15 metteurs en scène de son panthéon cinématographique.

jeudi 28 novembre 2019

Hollywood Critics Association Awards


The Hollywood Critics Association, formerly known as The Los Angeles Online Film Critics Society, announced their nominees for the 3rd Annual Hollywood Critic Awards being held at the Taglyan Complex in Los Angeles on January 9th, 2020.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon in Hollywood tops the HCA nominations list with a total of eleven nominations, while Netflix’s The Irishman and A24’s Waves each earn nine. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, which premiered at Sundance back in January, scored a total of seven nominations. Todd Phillips’ controversial Joker received quite a bit of love from the members of the HCA with a total of seven nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix. Noah Baumbach’s widely praised Marriage Story received six nominations, including Best Actor for Adam Driver and Best Actress for Scarlett Johansson.
Just like in the years past, the members of the Hollywood Critics Society are continuing to support some of the more underrepresented films of the year including Neon’s Wild Rose, Amazon’s Brittany Runs A Marathon, Warner Brothers’ Blinded by the Light, and Roadside Attraction’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, amongst several others.
“The creation and goal of this organization has always been about celebrating film while embracing diversity and elevating underrepresented voices. We believe that our mission is universal, and this is why we changed our name to be reflective of that. As we continue to push for change, we want to be part of the solution, which means slowly building a community of passionate critics who are reflective of the USA and the world as a whole,” states HCA’s Chairman, Scott Menzel.
In total, the Hollywood Critic Association nominated 59 different films, including several independents as well as major studio blockbusters. Netflix received the most nominations with a total of 20 with A24 not too far behind, earning 18, followed by Sony with 16.
A full list of the HCA nominations can be found below:

Best Picture
1917
Booksmart
The Farewell
The Irishman
Joker
Jojo Rabbit
Parasite
Marriage Story
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Waves

Best Actor
Adam Driver, Marriage Story
Eddie Murphy, Dolemite is My Name
Joaquin Phoenix, Joker
Leonardo DiCaprio, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Taron Egerton, Rocketman

Best Actress
Awkwafina, The Farewell
Charlize Theron, Bombshell
Lupita Nyong’o, Us
Renée Zellweger, Judy
Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story

Best Supporting Actor
Brad Pitt, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Shia LaBeouf, Honey Boy
Sterling K. Brown, Waves
Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Best Supporting Actress
Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers
Laura Dern, Marriage Story
Margot Robbie, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Taylor Russell, Waves
Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell

Best Adapted Screenplay
Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit
Steven Zaillian, The Irishman
Anthony McCarten, The Two Popes
Scott Silver and Todd Phillips, Joker
Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers

Best Original Screenplay 
Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won, Parasite
Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman, Booksmart
Lulu Wang, The Farewell
Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Rian Johnson, Knives Out

Best Male Director
Bong Joon-ho, Parasite
Martin Scorsese, The Irishman
Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit

Best Female Director
Alma Har’el, Honey Boy
Greta Gerwig, Little Women
Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers
Lulu Wang, The Farewell
Olivia Wilde, Booksmart

Best Performance by an Actor or Actress 23 and Under
Kaitlyn Dever, Booksmart
Julia Butters, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Noah Jupe, Honey Boy
Roman Griffin Davis, Jojo Rabbit
Thomasin McKenzie, Jojo Rabbit

Breakthrough Performance
Jessie Buckley, Wild Rose
Kelvin Harrison Jr, Waves
Paul Walter Hauser, Richard Jewell
Taylor Russell, Waves
Zack Gottsagen, The Peanut Butter Falcon

Best Cast
Avengers: Endgame
The Irishman
Knives Out
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Waves

Best First Feature
Brittany Runs A Marathon
Booksmart
Honey Boy
The Peanut Butter Falcon
Queen & Slim

Best Independent Film
Booksmart
The Farewell
Honey Boy
Luce
Waves

Best Action/War Film
1917
Avengers: Endgame
Captain Marvel
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Best Animated Film
Abominable
Frozen II
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Missing Link
Toy Story 4

Best Blockbuster
Avengers: Endgame
Captain Marvel
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Shazam!
Spider-Man: Far from Home

Best Comedy/Musical
Booksmart
Blinded by The Light
Dolemite is My Name
Long Shot
Rocketman

Best Documentary
American Factory
Apollo 11
Hail Satan?
The Kingmaker
Love, Antosha

Best Foreign Language Film
The Farewell
Monos
Pain & Glory
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Best Horror
Crawl
Doctor Sleep
Midsommar
Ready or Not
Us

Best Animated or VFX Performance
Josh Brolin, Avengers: Endgame
Robert De Niro, The Irishman
Rosa Salazar, Alita: Battle Angel
Ryan Reynolds, Pokemon Detective Pikachu
Tom Hanks, Toy Story 4

Best Cinematography 
Drew Daniel, Waves
Jarin Blaschke, The Lighthouse
Lawrence Sher, Joker
Robert Richardson, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Roger Deakins, 1917

Best Costume Design
Arianne Phillips, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Julian Day, Rocketman
Jacqueline Durran, Little Women
Ruth E Carter, Dolemite is My Name
Mark Bridges, Joker

Best Editing 
Fred Raskin, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Lee Smith, 1917
Michael McCusker, Ford V. Ferrari
Thelma Schoonmaker, The Irishman
Yang Jin-mo, Parasite

Best Hair and Makeup
Jeremy Woodhead, Judy
Kazu Hiro, Anne Morgan, and Vivian Baker, Bombshell
Nicki Ledermann and Kay Georgiou, Joker
Nicki Ledermann, Sean Flanigan, and Carla White, The Irishman
Lizzie Yianni Georgiou, Tapio Salmi, and Barrie Gower, Rocketman

Best Original Song
Catchy Song, The Lego Movie: The Second Part
Glasgow, Wild Rose
(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again, Rocketman
Into the Unknown, Frozen 2
Speechless, Aladdin

Best Score
Alexandre Desplat, Little Women
Hildur Guðnadóttir, Joker
Michael Abels, Us
Thomas Newman, 1917
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Waves

Best Stunt Work
1917
Avengers: Endgame
Captain Marvel
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Best Visual Effects 
Allen Maris, Jedediah Smith, Guillaume Rocheron, and Scott R. Fisher, Ad Astra
Dan Deleeuw, Matt Aitken, Russell Earl, and Dan Sudick, Avengers: Endgame
Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon and Nick Epstein, Alita: Battle Angel
Guillaume Rocheron, Greg Butler, and Dominic Tuohy, 1917
Pablo Herman, Leandro Estebecorena, Stephane Grabli, and Nelson Sepulveda, The Irishman

mardi 19 novembre 2019

Nic Cage dans Nic Cage?



Nicolas Cage sera Nicolas Cage dans The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Le pitch: un Nicolas Cage du passé parle au Nicolas Cage du présent, désespéré à l'idée de décrocher un rôle dans le prochain film de... Quentin Tarantino. On peut être sûr que ça va faire marrer QT et qu'il trouvera un truc à Nic Cage dans un avenir proche. Pari tenu?

OUATIH: la version rallongée distribuée en France


Le 25 octobre, 1000 salles américaines projetaient une version longue de OUATIH, à vrai dire une version amplifiée de quelques bonus: nouvelle pub Red Apple, pub pour Old Chattanooga Beer et scènes coupées. Pas vraiment indispensable au montage, il s'agit plutôt d'occuper le terrain et les esprits à l'approche de la saison des prix, le film étant sorti pendant l'été.

Reste que cette nouvelle version - la troisième depuis Cannes et avant, sans doute, une version longue pour Netflix - sera finalement distribuée en France à partir de demain, 20 novembre, dans un réseau confidentiel de cinémas parisiens et quelques provinciaux:

Paris :
Le Grand Action, L'épée de bois, Le Lucernaire, MK2 Parnasse, Studio Galande, L'entrepôt, Cinéma Beauregard, Studio 28

Province :
Cinéma Axel Chalon sur Saône, Cinéma Kinepolis de Lomme.

Creating the Quentin Tarantino 1969 dress code for OUATIH


Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is his personal love letter to Tinseltown, set during the seismic clash in 1969 of old and new cultures. And that posed a unique creative challenge for his go-to costume designer Arianne Phillips, who was unaccustomed to interweaving so much history and fiction in a Tarantino movie.

“It required its own unique process because here we have real life events, real people that are part of the culture — the Manson murders and Hollywood at that time [including Margot Robbie as slain actress Sharon Tate],” Phillips said. “And then at the center of that, we have these two fictional characters, Rick Dalton [Leonardo DiCaprio] and Cliff Booth [Brad Pitt], the cowboy actor and his stunt double. Also, this required a certain reportage feel, in that we really wanted to transport the audience and revisit Hollywood as it was in 1969.”


Naturally, like every other member of Team Tarantino, Phillips did her homework by revisiting the movies and TV shows of 1969 (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Easy Rider,” and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” chief among them). And she discussed with Tarantino the amalgamation of Dalton and Booth, as those who made the transition from TV to movies and those who didn’t, from Steve McQueen to Edd “Kookie” Byrnes (“77 Sunset Strip”). But the most important discussions centered around the psychological makeups for the two characters: Dalton was past his prime and still trapped in the ’50s while Booth was more casual, open, and forward-thinking.

“Quentin and I created a backstory of Rick taking clothes from his [successful] ‘Bounty Law’ western TV series,” said Phillips, who put DiCaprio through 22 costume changes. “His badass cowboy boots were part of the veneer.” Although Tarantino’s script didn’t specify a leather jacket, Phillips thought it was an important part of the director’s vernacular to include in the movie. “Leo and I both loved the leather jacket idea as a way of toughening Rick up,” she added. “In that meeting with Al Pacino’s agent in Musso & Frank, Rick didn’t want to wear an establishment suit. We also gave him a mock turtleneck. Quentin and I had these conversations of it being like a tie. There’s something very clean and dressed up about that. Putting a tie or scarf on Rick just seemed too comical.”

Dalton definitely gets put off stride when forced to look like a hippie cowboy for his guest spot on the “Lancer” TV series. But the rigorous shoot enables him at last to find his mojo. “Both Quentin and I agreed that tie-dyed and fringe were not going to be in this movie, with the exception of this fringe jacket,” Phillips said. “Making Rick a hippie becomes his worst nightmare. But it was great, like a stylized version of a cowboy, the Dennis Hopper way.”


It turned Dalton’s corny “Bounty Law” cowboy on its head. It was all part of exploring a character arc through Dalton’s wardrobe, especially when he confidently returns home after starring in a string of spaghetti westerns in Italy. “He’s got some money in his pocket and he bought clothes in Italy, bolstered by his success,” Phillips added. “He wears that Smothers Brothers neckerchief and leisure suit as we head into the ’70s.”

By contrast, Pitt’s Booth carries himself off with confidence, charm, and a Zen-like grace. And yet he possesses a menacing violent streak as well. Phillips appropriately dressed him in moccasins, a yellow Hawaiian shirt, and denim. “I loved the idea of him wearing moccasins, which would harken to the fact that he’s not out of touch, and I was also inspired by ‘Billy Jack,'” she said. “He dresses for comfort and has no one to impress.”

The Hawaiian shirt, though, was scripted as part of Tarantino’s vernacular, but the motif was up for interpretation, and so Phillips layered it with an Asian motif. But the denim had a dual purpose. “He wore denim, which was only worn as work wear during that time, except for the Manson family, which wore denim as part of their youth rebellion. But Cliff is an outsider and he went against the dress code at Musso’s by wearing his denim jeans and jacket at the bar.”

Meanwhile, dressing Robbie as Tate (who lives near Dalton in Benedict Canyon) offered a completely different process for Phillips. The costume designer was able to strike a balance between historical accuracy and creative license. “I did a lot of research on who she was and what she wore and learned about her life,” Phillips said. “Lucky for us, Deborah Tate, her sister, was a consultant.  We got to see her wardrobe, and Quentin and I wanted to recreate a couple of costumes based on reference pictures. Other costumes were created to fit the movie. Deborah very generously allowed us to use some of Sharon’s jewelry, which Margot wore. They were simple costume pieces. As a Talisman, it was welcomed.

Tate personifies a sense of freedom and innocence and Phillips dressed Robbie frequently in yellow, including an ensemble at the Playboy Mansion inspired by something similar she wore to the “Rosemary’s Baby” premiere from Ossie Clark, a Swinging Sixties London fashion designer. On top of that she wore another Clark specialty: a long python printed coat.

However, Phillips dressed the actress in black turtleneck, white miniskirt, and white go-go boots for the bravura sequence in Westwood, where Tate drops off a hitchhiker, buys a copy of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” for husband Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha), and then watches herself on screen in “The Wrecking Crew.” “This was based on research but also part of Quentin’s vernacular with his love of black-and-white,” she said.

Source: Indiewire


dimanche 17 novembre 2019

Camerimage: Duo Awards


Camerimage, festival basé à Torun en Pologne et rendant hommage aux directeurs de la photographie, s'est tenu ce week-end. Si Joker a remporté le prix pour la meilleure photo de l'année (Lawrence Sher), Quentin Tarantino et Robert Richardson se sont vu remettre le Duo Awards pour leur collaboration de 6 films.

“This is one of the proudest awards I’ve ever won,” said Tarantino. “I just got married this last year, but before that I’ve been married to this man [gesturing to Richardson]. After we first started working together, he said, ‘How do you think it’s going?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m putting towels in my house that have your monogram and my monogram on it.”

“I mean this from the bottom of my black heart,” Tarantino said. “Working with Bob is literally one of the greatest joys of my life and he’s led my films to a visual sophistication that, back when I was working at the video store, I couldn’t even dream of achieving myself, but I could appreciate in others.”

“Quentin is the most brilliant director I’ve ever worked with,” said Richardson, who has worked with other notable auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone. “Last night I sat with him for an hour and he read something to me that he just wrote, and this morning as well. His brain is fucking on fire. We should all be so lucky as cinematographers to have a man this talented, and why we create as cinematographers is because of men and women like him, and we should be very much in praise. Quentin, I love you.”

jeudi 14 novembre 2019

Tarantino a un plan


Tarantino était reçu ce 13 novembre par l'académie britannique du cinéma, la BAFTA, pour un Q&A revenant sur sa carrière. A cette occasion, les fans ont pu poser leurs questions. Il a déclaré être en pleine frénésie d'écriture. Après OUATIH, il a écrit une pièce, cinq épisodes de Bounty Law et le début d'un roman. L'écriture du dit roman devrait l'emmener jusqu'en mars prochain. Il a l'intention de donner vie à chacun de ces projets avant de commencer à se pencher sur son 10ème et dernier film.

“So I finished ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,’ finished that script, put it aside, and then I wrote a play. And then I wrote a five-episode TV series. And right now I’m writing a book and I’m hoping that I’ll be finished in three months. So the idea will be hopefully by March maybe I’ll be finished with the book – and then, theoretically, maybe I’ll do the play, and then theoretically I’ll do the TV show, and then by that point I’ll be thinking maybe what I’ll do for the 10th movie.”

jeudi 7 novembre 2019

OUATIH: que devient Rick Dalton après le film?


Les personnages de Quentin Tarantino continuent de vivre dans son esprit, même quand le film est terminé. Le réalisateur a évoqué le destin de Rick Dalton (joué par Leonardo DiCaprio) après Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood durant le podcast The Margaret Cho : « Sa carrière pourrait se poursuivre de différentes façons. Si vous pensez qu’il représente George Maharis ça ira dans un sens, et si pour vous il est Ty Hardin ça ira dans un autre. C’est un mélange des deux. À la fin des années 70-début 80, ces premiers rôles machos de la télévision des années 50 et 60 sont revenus aux séries, mais cette fois dans des rôles de vieux flics, de chefs de jeunes policiers qu’ils envoyaient en mission. C’est ce qui pourrait se passer pour Rick, même s’il avait plus de succès dans les années 70 que je ne l’envisage, parce que c’est arrivé à des tas de types de ce genre ».
Quentin Tarantino cite notamment Earl Holliman, Jack Kelly (Maverick), et Vic Morrow (Mannix, Magnum). « Je dirais que je verrais bien Rick Dalton devenir l’un de ces gars », conclut-il.

Source: Première

OUATIH: l'impro de Di Caprio



Oublier son texte, tous les acteurs l’ont expérimenté et ont fait avec. Mais pour Rick Dalton, comédien de séries télévisées western incarné par Leonardo DiCaprio, c’est une tragédie. Après avoir ressenti une vive humiliation en public sur le tournage de Lancer, l’ancienne star du show Bounty Law s’enferme dans sa caravane pour se lâcher et s’insulter copieusement, espérant remettre de l’ordre dans ses idées et se reprendre. Une séquence importante, marquant un tournant dans la psychologie du personnage. Pourtant, d’après son interprète et le réalisateur Quentin Tarantino, ce coup de colère n’était absolument pas prévu dans le scénario, comme ils l’ont expliqué dans des propos rapportés par CinemaBlend.

"Comme ce n’était pas dans le script, on n’a jamais cherché à la répéter," affirme Tarantino, avant de rajouter : "C’est une idée qui nous est venue sur le plateau, parce qu’il y avait vraiment un truc à exploiter d’après Leo. À un moment, il est venu me voir et m’a sorti "Écoute, il faut que je foire pendant la séquence de Lancer, d’accord ? À ce moment-là, il faudrait que ça provoque une vraie crise existentielle." Ma première réaction, ça a été de lui dire : "Attends, tu veux foirer ma séquence de western ? C’est mon western, tu piges ? J’essaie de rajouter du putain de western dans ce film au moment où les gens ne s’y attendent pas. Alors viens pas me foirer ça !""
Après délibérations avec son acteur, le réalisateur a accepté de faire deux tentatives : une scène dans laquelle Rick Dalton ne se raterait pas, puis une avec l’oubli de texte. C’est finalement cette dernière qui a été retenue, après avoir émerveillé Tarantino, la trouvant "géniale". Mais ce changement de plan impliquant forcément des différences avec le scénario, il a fallu ajouter un nouveau passage : la remise en question de Dalton dans sa caravane. "J’ai dit à Leo : "Ok, maintenant il va nous falloir un peu plus que ça si on veut vraiment construire quelque chose… tu vas avoir ton duel, mais ce sera avec toi-même pendant une pause sur le plateau de Lancer." Je le lui ai dit comme ça, et c’est comme ça qu’on a tourné."

Un seul angle de caméra, Leonardo DiCaprio dans sa caravane s’en prenant à lui-même et se remettant en question, furieux après s’être trompé devant l’équipe technique de la série western… d’apparence simple, la séquence a pourtant été un vrai défi pour l’acteur, pris au dépourvu d’après Tarantino : "Il m’a demandé "Qu’est-ce que je devrais dire ?" Alors j’ai proposé : "Tu devrais improviser. Je te filerai des idées." Et je lui ai donné des pistes sur des choses qui pourraient obséder Rick Dalton et le faire péter un câble : son collègue Jim Stacy, la gamine... Mais il l’a fait à sa sauce. Et quand il commençait à manquer d’inspiration, je lui glissais des indications. Pour moi, aussi forte que soit la scène, la chose la plus touchante dans sa création, c’était la nervosité de Leo ! Je veux dire, je ne l’avais jamais vu aussi mal à l’aise que ce jour-là."
Once Upon a time… in Hollywood est sorti cet été au cinéma et fait partie des quatre meilleurs films au box-office français de Quentin Tarantino : le film a cumulé 2,6 millions d’entrées, juste derrière les 2,8 millions de Pulp Fiction et Inglourious Basterds.

Source: Première

lundi 4 novembre 2019

Crawl, meilleur film de 2019 pour QT


Tarantino est toujours consulté et/ou donne souvent son avis sur ce qu'il a vu, ce qu'il a aimé, ce qu'il faut voir, à grand renfort de classement par genre ou par année d'exploitation. S'il reconnaît avoir vu peu de film cette année à cause du tournage, du montage et de la promo de Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, il vote pour le Crawl d'Alexandre Aja, petite série B de genre efficace. Des crocos dans le salon, à voir absolument.


dimanche 3 novembre 2019

Q&A with Tarantino, Pitt, Di Caprio and Robbie



One of the most memorable moments in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is Rick Dalton's (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) frantic meltdown in his trailer after he forgets his lines while shooting a pilot for western series Lancer. As it turns out, that scene was not in the original script, and was added by Quentin Tarantino at DiCaprio's behest.

The star told the writer-director, "I need to fuck up during the Lancer sequence, and when I fuck up during the Lancer sequence, I need to have a real crisis of conscious about it and I have to come back from it in some way," Tarantino remembered at a post-screening Q&A in Los Angeles on Sunday. "My response was, 'You're going to fuck up my Lancer sequence?! That's my western! I get two-for-one in this movie, I snuck a western in here while no one was fucking looking!'"

To appease both parties, Tarantino shot the scene both with the forgotten lines and without, deciding that "with the fuck up, it was just so amazing that of course we were going to use it," and then went about crafting the trailer tantrum, deciding to mostly leave it up to DiCaprio to improvise. The director wanted to do three continuous takes with DiCaprio in crisis, and planned to cut together the best bits ⁠— he threw out topics to his star but DiCaprio was left to do the rest. For example, Tarantino would say, "Get pissed off about Jim Stacy," and DiCaprio would respond, "Oh that fucking Jim Stacy, just sitting up there watching me, thinking he's so fucking hot, he wouldn't be a wrangler on my show." He director laughed remembering, "the cutest part was how nervous he was to do it, I've never seen him so nervous."

The Q&A, which featured Tarantino, DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, was held at Tarantino's New Beverly Cinema theater, and was part of a nationwide event where the (phone-free) moderated discussion was live-streamed into select theaters across the country. Much of the conversation revolved around Tarantino's unique filmmaking process, which included giving DiCaprio a rigorous film education and transforming current-day Los Angeles into the 1969 version of the city.
Noting how nothing in the film uses CGI or green screens, DiCaprio said, "It's like nostalgia within nostalgia, because we're doing a film about Hollywood in 1969, and then we're also doing a film that is done the way they do it in 1969," while Robbie added, "I don't think I've ever felt so transported as I did on Quentin's set." Part of that, she said, was due to Tarantino's no-phones-on-set rule, which prompted Pitt to share an "epic" story from working with the director on Inglourious Basterds
"You have to check your phone in —there are no phones, this is sacred ground —and one went off in between takes and you would've thought someone went into the Sistine Chapel and took a shit," Pitt joked. "Not only did production come to a grinding halt —and no one would cop to it, even though we knew the general area —Quentin sent us home for the rest of the day and we had the afternoon off to think about we had done."

"I ask you for one thing, and if you have no more respect for me than that, then go home," Tarantino said in justifying the situation, while Pitt mic-dropped in response.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which follows the lives of fading western TV star Dalton and his stuntman Cliff Booth (Pitt), all while navigating a changing Hollywood and the arrival of the Manson Family, also features many A-list actors in minor roles, including Al Pacino and the late Luke Perry. DiCaprio, who acts opposite both in the film, remembered that he was "brought back to my teenage past and felt starstruck" upon meeting Perry, whom he said "couldn't have been a gentler soul."
The star also revealed that though his and Pacino's scenes account for just a few minutes in the movie, they were shooting together for almost three weeks, and DiCaprio "got to rehearse with Al at my house and his place for months beforehand because we had these long sequences together, and that was just a magical moment, one-on-one with Al Pacino."

Pitt, whose character spends some significant screen time at Manson's Spahn Ranch —where he checks in on George Spahn (played by Bruce Dern) — chatted about working with Burt Reynolds, who was set to play the part of Spahn before his death. "We got to spend two glorious, fun-filled days with Burt and I'm grateful for the experience," Pitt said, remembering how Reynolds himself had a famous friendship with his stuntman Hal Needham, and "he told us a lot of stories about their relationship."

Robbie also spoke about getting into character as Sharon Tate, which was "beautiful in its simplicity," but challenging in giving such a light, carefree performance.
"I find it a lot easier to go dark, a lot easier to yell and scream and cry and do all of that on screen; I can get there a lot quicker. To be truly light all the time was actually hard, weirdly hard," she said, while also revealing she worked with a movement coach and "did a lot of weird stuff, like where you run around and pretend to be a cloud." Robbie also made a list of everything that made her happy and would try to do all of those things on shooting days, as well as rules like she "couldn't look at emails within 24 hours of going to set" to cut out stressors.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

vendredi 1 novembre 2019

OUATIH: l'édition spéciale Blu-Ray 4K



Le Blu-ray 4K du film
Inclus le Blu-ray du film
Un exemplaire exclusif d’un numéro parodique de MAD magazine inspiré par le film
Un disque vinyle 45 tours : "Good thing" de Paul Revere and the Raiders, et "Bring a little lovin" de Los Bravos
Un adaptateur pour platine
Un poster collector vintage de Rick Dalton tiré du film Operazione Dyn-o-mite !
7 Scènes supplémentaires

Bonus :
Blu-ray :
La lettre d'amour de Quentin Tarantino à Hollywood
Bob Richardson : Pour l'amour du cinéma
Entre spécialistes : Les voitures de 1969
Recréer Hollywood : Le décor de production de Once Upon a Time… à Hollywood
La mode de 1969



En précommande ICI

jeudi 31 octobre 2019

OUATIH: Scène coupée


Une scène coupée avec Julia Butters refait surface à l'occasion de la ressortie de Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood dans les salles américaines. Le blu-ray sortira le 14 décembre prochain avec 20 minutes de scènes supplémentaires.

vendredi 25 octobre 2019

OUATIH: Nouveau montage et nouvelle sortie ciné


OUATIH encensé, OUATIH critiqué, OUATIH censuré oui mais OUATIH remonté! Tarantino va nous proposer un nouveau montage avec quatre scènes supplémentaires, soit dix minutes de rab' à l'écran, pour une nouvelle exploitation en salle pour occuper le terrain et les esprits en plein sprint pour les prix de fin d'année. Le film ressortira dans 1000 salles, sur sol US uniquement. Reste à savoir ce qu'il y aura de neuf à se mettre sous la dent: on parle de plus de Manson ou de certains rôles coupés (Tim Roth en valet de Pacino ou James Marsden en Burt Reynolds) mais aussi d'une scène de Julia Butters qui pourrait lui valoir une nomination à l'Oscar selon David Heyman, producteur du film.

mercredi 23 octobre 2019

Tarantino vs La censure chinoise



Vendredi 18 octobre, le Hollywood Reporter annonçait que la sortie de Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood en Chine, prévue pour le 25 octobre, avait été annulée sur décision des autorités chinoises. Si les raisons qui ont présidé à ce changement abrupt de planning n'ont pas été clairement énoncées, certaines sources proches du dossier pointent du côté de la représentation qu'a faite Quentin Tarantino de l'acteur chinois et maître d'arts martiaux Bruce Lee dans son film.

Tarantino avait été vivement critiqué par la fille de l'acteur, Shannon Lee, pour une scène où son père, ridiculisé, se bat contre le personnage de Brad Pitt, Cliff - qui prend l'avantage. Le réalisateur s'était défendu en arguant qu'il n'avait fait que dépeindre l'arrogance bien réelle de Lee et que Cliff était un personnage fictif auquel on pouvait prêter des qualités supérieures à celles de son adversaire. En amont de la sortie du film en Chine, Shannon Lee aurait alors adressé une demande de modification de la scène à l'administration en charge du cinéma sur le territoire chinois.

L'annulation de la sortie de Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood a lieu dans un contexte de contrôle accru des "produits de divertissement", tant étrangers que nationaux, alors que la Chine voit son autorité défiée par la révolte du peuple de Hong Kong. Le film One Second de Zhang Yimou (La Cité interdite) avait déjà fait les frais de cette ingérence plus tôt cette année : situé dans la Chine protestataire des années 1960, il avait été interdit de participation aux festivals internationaux. Au mois de juin, la projection du film épique de Guan Hu, The Eight Hundred, avait quant à elle était annulée la veille de son avant-première au Festival de Shanghai, dont il devait faire l'ouverture.

Les producteurs du dernier film de Tarantino comptaient sur sa distribution en Chine, estimant que le marché chinois aurait permis à Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood de dépasser les 400 millions de dollars de recettes - le film en a jusqu'ici généré 366 millions. Toutefois, Tarantino n'a pas l'intention de renvoyer son film en salle de montage, d'après les informations du Hollywood Reporter, qui n'a pas obtenu de réaction de la part de Sony Pictures Entertainment, qui détient le film.
Dans les contrats que signe le cinéaste avec ses producteurs et distributeurs à chaque nouvelle réalisation, une clause stipule que Tarantino détient les droits sur le final cut. Sans son accord, aucun changement n'est donc possible. Or la Chine n'obtiendra probablement pas satisfaction tant qu'elle se refusera à communiquer les raisons précises de l'annulation de la sortie du film.
La distribution du film aurait pourtant marqué la première sortie digne de ce nom d'un film de Tarantino dans le pays, après la sortie ratée de Django Unchained en 2012 : les scènes jugées trop violentes avaient été coupées - avec l'accord du réalisateur -, retardant d'un mois une sortie qu'avait court-circuitée le trafic d'une version pirate.

Source: Les Inrocks

lundi 14 octobre 2019

QT8: la critique de Film Threat


Documentary QT8: The First Eight is director Tara Wood’s wonderfully exuberant and satisfying retrospective of the work of American auteur Quentin Tarantino. The documentary tracks Tarantino from his beginnings working in a video store in Manhattan Beach, to his time as a screenwriter, eventually parlaying the earnings from an early script, and from a TV appearance as Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls, into the production of Reservoir Dogs. He’s been a mainstay of film ever since. 
Twenty-one years after the release of Reservoir Dogs, the darling director of the Indie film scene is now arguably so popular and successful that he is maybe not so Indie anymore. This hardly matters as long as Tarantino keeps making films that express, above all else, his love for the art and film history during his lifetime in a way that resonates with hardcore fans and annoys everyone else. 


samedi 12 octobre 2019

Robert Forster 13 juillet 1941 - 11 octobre 2019


Robert Forster, nommé aux Oscars en 1998 pour sa performance dans Jackie Brown de Quentin Tarantino, est mort vendredi 11 octobre à l’âge de 78 ans, a annoncé son attaché de presse à The Hollywood Reporter. Né à Rochester (Etat de New York), il est décédé des suites d’un cancer au cerveau à son domicile à Los Angeles.
Pour beaucoup, il restera Max Cherry dans Jackie Brown, un personnage que Quentin Tarantino avait imaginé pour lui. Abonné aux seconds rôles, il a été vu dans plus de cent films, dont Mulholland Drive de David Lynch et The Descendants d’Alexander Payne. Plus récemment, Robert Forster interprétait Ed dans la série à succès Breaking Bad et le film El Camino : A Breaking Bad Movie.

mercredi 9 octobre 2019

Pulp Fiction Locations: 25 years after



Le Los Angeles Mag a publié un très beau papier sur les lieux de tournage de Pulp fiction 25 ans après. Après Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, c'est donc une nouvelle ballade dans un Los Angeles partiellement disparu que nous propose, indirectement Quentin Tarantino:

ICI 

vendredi 4 octobre 2019

QT8: the First Eight


A journey through the films of Quentin Tarantino, narrated by the collaborators who know him best. QT8: The First Eight is coming to theaters for ONE NIGHT ONLY October 21st!

Get tickets now: bit.ly/QT8fathom #QT8




How Quentin Tarantino got the ‘60s sound for ‘Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood’


For a brief moment in his then-young rock career, Mark Lindsay lived in a gorgeous home at the top of Benedict Canyon. The singer-songwriter, co-founder of the group Paul Revere & the Raiders, moved there with his buddy, record producer Terry Melcher, in the late ’60s. He wrote some of his band’s best work there, including the single “Good Thing,” which he penned on a piano in the living room.

Lindsay left the house when Melcher wanted to live with his girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen. They soon rented the place to director Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate.
What happened next in that living room inaugurated one of the darkest weeks in L.A. history. But Lindsay still remembers the place fondly, even if he did once bump into Charles Manson at a party there.

“Those two years were my golden years,” Lindsay said onstage at the Grammy Museum on Wednesday night in conversation with director Quentin Tarantino. “I remember drinking rosè in the garden with Terry outside in that liquid sunshine and saying, ‘it doesn’t get better than this’ and thinking it’ll never get worse. It didn’t until 1969.”

For director and L.A. native Tarantino, however, the coincidence is a thread that ties his whole film “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” together. All of his obsessions — vintage rock and roll, movie-business lore, darkly comic idylls cut through with horrific violence — wound through that property at the top of Cielo Drive (it’s now demolished, of course). He and Lindsay talked about evoking that golden era of L.A. rock radio in “Once Upon a Time …” and how it set the tone for the nightmare to come.

“Paul Revere & the Raiders was exactly the kind of band that would have rocked my little socks off,” Tarantino said of Lindsay’s pre-fab conceptual, velvety-voiced act. “And the reason Manson knew of Terry Melcher was because of Paul Revere & the Raiders.”

“Once Upon a Time …” was the rare original summer flick to best $100 million at the box office this year. The star-packed throwback follows a TV actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his loyal stuntman sidekick (Brad Pitt) through the wane of their careers in late-’60s L.A., all while something evil kindles in the canyons over the hill.

Throughout the film, Lindsay’s songs help set the hyper-specific tone of the era’s music — less the raw psychedelia of the tastemaking historians and more the amber hues of the innocence that Manson would soon shatter. Though Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate pokes fun at the band in the script (“Don’t tell Jim Morrison you’re dancing to the Raiders!”), their slinky, creepy song “Hungry” plays as she meets her eventual killer for the first time in the driveway.

It’s by now no spoiler to say the film takes some liberties with the actual events the night of the Manson murders. But for Lindsay, Tarantino’s vigilant re-creation of the scene — down to the actual sheet music in the actual piano from the living room that night — was beyond uncanny.
“The room where Abigail Folger slept was my room,” Lindsay said. “It’s just like I’m back again.”

On Wednesday, even Tarantino’s conversation was peppered with such callbacks. Onstage, moderator David Wild, a rock journalist and Grammy scriptwriter, got a text from another favorite Tarantino soundtrack source, Neil Diamond, suggesting the director sync a few more tunes in his next project. Tarantino’s movies have always mined vintage rock for unexpected revelations and new contexts, ever since his impeccable use of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” in Pulp Fiction.
“I want to be known for my discography as much as my filmography,” Tarantino said. When he’s picking soundtrack cuts, he joked that he imagines that “every director I know is in there going ‘Oh god, now I have to get out of the business’.”

“Once Upon a Time …” was a chance to marinate ever deeper in the era’s AM radio (especially the old L.A. station KHJ). Tarantino and music supervisor Mary Ramos unearthed around a full daytime block’s worth of recordings from the era for research — ad jingles, DJ patter and all. Drive-time radio wasn’t just a historical reference point in the film, he said, but a way to set the ambience in the eternal, doomed summer of ’60s L.A. at the margins of the movie business.

“There’s an L.A. quality to Brad Pitt’s character where he works in Hollywood but doesn’t live there,” Tarantino said. “He’s given his life to the entertainment business but doesn’t have anything to show for it. He drives home to Panorama City, and in that time you hear four songs, which gives you an idea of how long it takes to drive there.”

For Lindsay, the return to the stage has indeed been a long drive through a career that, if he hadn’t lived it, could have been scripted by Tarantino. It wasn’t all L.A. classic rock; Lindsay performed the synth score for the 1980 Japanese action flick “Shogun Assassin,” a favorite sample source for the Wu-Tang Clan and other rappers.

But on this night, he did his best to invoke the mood of “Once Upon a Time,” performing three songs from the movie with a choral ensemble from Orange County’s Tesoro High School.

Lindsay’s voice still had that velvety touch that made long, aimless drives through the Hollywood flatlands so moody back then. Tarantino almost always makes stars of his deep-cut soundtrack picks, but this was something else: an ever-rarer chance to hear the actual voice ringing through that house on Cielo Drive, back before everything went dark.

Inglourious Comics







mardi 1 octobre 2019

DGA Quarterly Magazine: Martin Scorsese & Quentin Tarantino


Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino talk movie obsessions, director heroes, process and violence as catharsis.

Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino are born storytellers, not just in their movies—which bear each director's unmistakable stamp—but in their deep-seated appreciation for the medium. While they hail from different generations—Scorsese was among the first wave of film school grads in the mid '60s, and Tarantino's rise coincided with the indie film revolution of the early '90s—their passion and knowledge of cinema place them on equal footing. No genre escapes their grasp, whether it's prestige studio releases or B-movie potboilers, splashy musicals or noirish thrillers, art-house fare or spaghetti Westerns. They've been dining on this grand buffet all their lives, and it shows in their own work, in the characters they've created, and the lens through which they view the world. This is a particularly conspicuous year for both filmmakers: Tarantino's Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has galvanized critics and audiences alike since its debut at Cannes, while anticipation runs high for Scorsese's The Irishman, for which the director has spent considerable time in post dealing with digitally de-aging his leads. The two sat down for the DGA Quarterly to talk directors, influences and violence as catharsis, among other topics. This is an edited version of their conversation. –Steve Chagollan


Martin Scorsese: I just finalized the last cut on (The Irishman). 

Quentin Tarantino: I get a situation when I kind of get down to that very, very end, where it's like, "Let's try this" and "Let's try that." But we get to that one spot and then I go home that night and I think, "You know, that was horrible. I've got to put it all back in the next day." 

MS: This has taken over three months because, in a funny way, this particular film I didn't really screen that much because the last six months have been dealing with the de-aging.

QT: Yeah, yeah.

MS: And so we're doing that and it's quite intense. And so the ending is like two shots and I put another shot in. Then, [I'm thinking], "Wait, does it need that medium shot? Maybe we would just stay with the wide shot." So we tried that a few times, and then a couple of friends said, "Didn't you have another shot in there?" I said, "Yeah, maybe that's better." But the thing was, that in so doing, it changes the length of the last wide shot.

QT: Well, let me ask you a question about the movie you're doing now because you're dealing with, I think, the longest canvas you've dealt with. It's quite a few hours, right?

MS: Yeah.

QT: So how has that affected you as far as pacing is concerned?

MS: Interestingly enough, I figured out the pacing on the page this time with the script that [Steven] Zaillian [wrote]. And then—this is a complex situation because of the fact that it's being made with Netflix—it kind of stretches the length. In other words, I'm not sure if it had to be, for example, a two hour and 10 minute movie. Or could I have been at four hours?

QT: Right, yeah.

MS: I'm not certain as to the ultimate venue, so I made it pure in my head in a sense like, "What if it's just a movie? What if it's got to be as long as we feel or as short as we feel?" And, because the nature of the characters—basically, one character is telling the story in flashback at the age of 81.

QT: Uh-huh.

MS: And when you get to my age, Quentin—and you get a little slower, a little more contemplative and meditative—it's all about thinking of the past and about [the characters'] perception of the past and so, by the third shot in the picture,
I felt it in the editing. And I said, "Let's see where it takes us and play to a few audiences and see how they tolerate it or not."
So we kept saying, "We should try this and that." And also the nature of the computer-generated stuff we were doing gave us a certain pace.

QT: Yeah, yeah, okay.

MS: It's a quieter pace. It still has violence to it, it still has humor. But it comes in different ways. It's the old story: The more pictures you make, the more there is to learn.

QT: You know, Marty, I'll tell you an interesting story that I'm going through right now, and I thought it would lead to a very good question about you and movies, so let me go with this.
Right now, I'm working on a book. And I've got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he's back home, and it's like the '50s, and he doesn't respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he's been through. As far as he's concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini…

MS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

QT: And so he's like, "Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff."

MS: Right.

QT: So he finds himself drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he doesn't like and some of them he doesn't understand, but he knows he's seeing something.

MS: Uh-huh.

QT: So now, I find myself having a wonderful opportunity of, in some cases, rewatching and, in some cases, watching for the first time movies I've heard about forever, but from my character's perspective. So I'm enjoying watching them but I'm also [thinking], 'How is he taking it? How is he looking at it?' I always like to have a good excuse for just throwing down into a pit of cinema, so that brings me to ask you: When was it for you that you started being lured away from what you considered Hollywood movies, and started becoming more adventuresome and going outside of your neighborhood to actually see some of the other foreign films that you'd been maybe reading about?

MS: Well, it's a great question because my first seven, eight years or so of my life we were in Corona, Queens. And then my father had to move back to Elizabeth Street (in Lower Manhattan's Little Italy), the street he and my mother were born on, because of some problems with the landlord. And so I was thrown into what looked like the Dead End Kids [or] Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery, you know? [laughing]
But prior to that, probably because of the asthma, [my parents] would take me to the movies all the time. So I saw Duel in the Sun, [that] was the first one. And then The Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, noirs like The Threat, [by] Felix Feist. Did you ever see that?

QT: Yeah, yeah. Loved The Threat.

MS: And so and [Robert Wise's] Blood on the Moon. [William Seiter's] One Touch of Venus. [We] had a little television set, a 16" RCA Victor, and my grandparents would come over on a Friday night because they were showing Italian films for the Italian community. And the films were [Vittorio De Sica's] Bicycle Thieves; [and Roberto Rossellini's] Rome, Open City and PaisanAnd so at 5 years old, I saw the reaction of my grandparents crying watching Paisan and I heard the language that was the same as they were speaking. And so I knew there was another kind of cinema, but it wasn't the movies. 

QT: Yeah.

MS: The first film I saw about Hollywood was [Billy Wilder's] Sunset Boulevard.

QT: Right, yeah. [laughing] Very dark view of Hollywood.

MS: And so in a sense, they were codified—the truth was coming through a different code, and a different culture in a way. And it didn't make them any less [important] from the European films I saw. But there was something that affected me when I saw those Italian films on that small screen that I never got past, and so that changed everything.
That really gave me a view of the world, the foreign films. It made me curious about the rest of the world, apart from the Italian-American Sicilian community I was living in.

QT: So did it even open you up to New York, in a way—reaching those other cinemas, going outside of your neighborhood, searching out those places?

MS: It was more than that. Because it was really going into America, outside of the little village that I grew up in.

QT: Oh, yeah, I get you.

MS: It was scary. There were a lot of bad areas, so you'd go with some friends. Did you ever go to the 42nd Street when all the movies were playing at that time?

QT: You know, I never made it. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever went to New York was for one weekend of casting Reservoir Dogs. Now understand, I wanted to go to New York since the minute I heard that there was a New York and watch a New York cinema [bill]. But no one ever took me when I was a kid, and I couldn't afford to go when I was old. So we're casting the movie and Harvey Keitel was like, "I can't believe we're not going to give the New York actors a shot here." And I go, "Well, we can't afford it." He goes, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll arrange for a weekend of casting through a casting director and I'll put you and (producer) Lawrence Bender up, and I'll fly you out." So we had one weekend in New York casting. And when we come in from the airport, it's like in the morning, and we're just kind of driving through New York to get to the hotel, I think it was the Mayflower…

MS: Yeah.

QT: And I'm literally like, "OK, I've been wanting to go to a Times Square cinema my whole life. The first thing I'm going to do, as soon as we get done with work, I'm going to go to the Times Square, I want to go see whatever is playing." And Harvey goes, "Quentin, no you're not. In a week or two, you could do that, but you can't do that tomorrow. You're too new." [Scorsese is laughing throughout this story.]

MS: He was so right. And also the weird thing is that that was changed in the '50s. We'd go up but you'd have to have about four guys with you. And you go and they were showing every film you can imagine. There were no sex films. It was all regular Hollywood films.
We'd go up there and it was a dangerous place, you know, it was crazy. And they would show, you know, The Elusive Pimpernel, directed by [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger and on the same bill, Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, and beautiful Technicolor prints. But, across the street, they had Halls of Montezuma [and] To the Shores of Tripoli

QT: Yeah.

MS: Two films. One (Halls) I think is a Lewis Milestone, the other [Bruce Humberstone], and so they were beautiful Technicolor films. Right? They showed them black and white! [Tarantino laughing] And we'd go in the place, God knows what was going on in the balcony—there were fights, all kinds of stuff—but we went anyway. All of the prints were black-and-white prints, of like (John Ford's) Drums Along the Mohawk—black-and-white!

QT: [Laughing] Now, I had that experience in Downtown L.A., the Metropolitan Theatres there, it was the Cameo and the Arcade (both on S. Broadway). They were the all-night ones. As a matter of fact, I remember—I think it was in '82 because they never got an L.A. release—I remember that movie that Ralph De Vito did, Death Collector, which was Joe Pesci's [first film]…

MS: Yeah, that's how we got Joe for Raging Bull.

QT: Well, I heard it was playing at the Arcade. And I go, "Wow," it was like right after the Raging Bull. I go; that's the movie. The only way to see it was to go there at four in the morning. I'm not going to go there at eight at night. 

MS: Death Collector, Bob (De Niro) saw it on CBS. He said, "I saw this thing on TV, and this guy is really interesting," so we got a print of it. That's how we looked at it, you know?

QT: It's a good film. When I actually saw it. It was like, "Oh, wow, this is like an exploitation version of Mean Streets."

MS: You're right! [laughing]. Now the repertories are gone, of course, so, it's a different thing entirely.

QT: Well, just so you know, I own a repertory theater out here in Los Angeles, the New Beverly, and we do great with your films. 

MS: Oh, thank you.

QT: And we only show 35 or 16 [mm]. And we have a full trailer collection.

New York vs. L.A. School of Cinema


QT: When I think of New York filmmakers, I think of you, Marty. I think of Sidney Lumet. I think of Woody Allen. But also, you're part of the New York New Wave, which was the '60s. You had the '60s shoestring guys, like you and Jim McBride and Shirley Clarke and Brian De Palma. I'm interested in that whole concept of the New York New Wave, and you guys more or less being inspired by the can-do spirit of the French New Wave. Give me a camera in sync and I'll attach it to this car and away we go.

MS: Or put it in a wheelchair and just go—a cameraman and a wheelchair and that's your dolly shot.

QT: Right.

MS: The New York thing sort of came out of postwar. There were very few films still being made in New York. [In] the studio system, of course, you had the factory. Why go to New York when you have everything you need in the studio? So what I think changed it was, of course, again, Neorealism, which was shooting out in the true actual locations.

QT: Yes.

MS: Slipping into film noir, like [Jules Dassin's] The Naked City and [Otto Preminger's] Where the Sidewalk Ends and everything else, even Force of Evil, [Abraham] Polonsky's film.

QT: Yeah.

MS: [They had] shots of New York, which were amazing. George Cukor, A Double Life, all these films, they actually started to take the cameras into the streets.

QT: Yeah.

MS: And New York was not a shooting [destination] at that time. You had this traffic, there's people that have work to do, they'd walk in front of the camera, they don't want to be told anything. They were hiding the camera in different places and, ultimately, it was the American avant garde, the films Jonas Mekas curated in the mid-'50s, Cinema 16. Amos Vogel, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke [with] The Connection...

QT: Yeah.

MS: (Clarke's) The Cool World. She shot it out in the streets. The man who really broke it, of course, was Cassavetes with Shadows.

QT: Yeah, he's the godfather of that, exactly.

MS: Once I saw Shadows, I looked at my friends and said, "Well, there's no more excuses." As long as you have something to say, we can do this. They were using a [16mm] Éclair [camera], which was smaller and lighter. And that was the go-to move because we saw you were able to do it and you didn't need the machine—good, bad or indifferent—of the West Coast.

QT: But the interesting thing about the New York New Wave, especially when compared to either Neorealism or the French New Wave is, I'd say, in the French New Wave movies, they're all taking place in the same town. At any point in time, Anna Karina's character from [Godard's] Vivre sa vie could bump into the piano player in [Truffaut's] Shoot the Piano Player. I mean, that could absolutely happen.

MS: Exactly. Yeah. 

QT: Whereas the New York New Wave, on the other hand, stuck to their neighborhoods. And showed us a very multifaceted version of New York. You wouldn't imagine the characters in The Cool World bumping into characters in [Scorsese's] Who's That Knocking at My Door or the Greenwich Village hippies from [De Palma's] Greetings. They're not going to exist in the same frame.

MS: No, no, no, those were different countries. We would never go to 110th Street. I don't know what they do up there. I don't care. It's a different world.
When I went to Washington Square College in 1960, NYU as it's known today, I just went to the corner of Houston and Elizabeth where I lived and made a left, six blocks. That was it. I was in another planet. And then it balanced both. [In] Mean Streets, [they] were kind of both in there, in a way: the outside world and the inside.

QT: I watched, fairly recently, Who's That Knocking at My Door. And one of the things that cracks me up on it is, because I know what a fan of [John Ford's] The Searchers you are, and so you had a whole big scene [on the Staten Island ferry] where [Harvey Keitel's character is] talking about [The Searchers]… 

MS: I had to do it, I know.

QT: It is my favorite scene in the whole movie. In fact, of the New York New Wave, your film was the most New Wavy looking. It looked a little bit like the French New Wave movies.

MS: Yeah, the black-and-white… But yeah, you're actually right. No doubt there was an influence of the French New Wave, and Bertolucci really; Before the Revolution was a wipeout. And Pasolini; for me, Accattone is the best of all of them, and somehow it translated. I loved what they did with the perforations on the film.

QT: Yeah.

MS: The frames, you know—when you look at a frame and you're editing with celluloid—ah. It's sublime. You could cut right on the edge of the frame. You'd go two frames and pull one out. I mean they were doing it, and we started doing it ourselves and experimenting.
It was what my old teacher, Haig Manoogian, said when we were shooting these short films at NYU at the time, and we'd get into an editing problem. We'd say, "But Truffaut said when he's cutting a film going one way, he recuts it to go another way." And my professor said, "That's nonsense. He wouldn't do that." Yeah, but we had this shot. He goes, "Listen, the point is that you may shoot a shot for a certain reason and then later when you're in the editing process and things aren't working…" It's like the monolith in [Kubrick's] 2001. You know, you touch the monolith and you take a shot that had nothing to do with that scene…

QT: Yeah.

MS: …And it works in another place and means something else. He said, "You learn about the value of the shot itself." The shot itself takes on its own life, and you can see that in little frames, 16 or 35, it didn't matter.

QT: It's funny you're saying that because actually one of my favorite things with me and my editors is basically when we cheat and get away with it, and it's as obvious as the nose on your face. 

MS: It's so obvious. There's a scene in Shutter Island with this woman who's in the insane asylum and [Leonardo DiCaprio's character is] interrogating her at a table, very nice woman, and she's talking about [how] she had killed her husband with an ax. And there's a shot over her shoulder—which is a very Hitchcock kind of thing; she has a glass and she takes a sip and puts it down; and cut back to Leo, he's interrogating her; come back to her; and then another shot over her shoulder where she takes the glass and goes like this and puts it down and there's no glass in her hand.

QT: Uh-huh. [laughs]

MS: Well, she was rehearsing. But I said, "Let's do that." You think there's a glass there. And hence, the whole story: what's true, what isn't true, what is imagined.

QT: Oh, that's perfect.

MS: Cheating is…

QT: It's a very honorable thing to do. You just have to pull it off.

MS: That's right. It takes on its own life. Things you'd think would never cut together, do. [Then] things you think are just going to be beautiful cut together—a disaster.

QT: I'm wrapping up my publicity tour on (Once Upon a Time…) and I get questions like, "What was the most difficult scene for you to do?" I guess my real answer to that question usually is, if I've got a big set piece I'm getting ready to do, and it's Tuesday and we start it on Wednesday. And half of the reason I'm doing the movie is to do this sequence, which I've watched in my head so I see it. And now, if I don't do it at least as good [as I see it] in my head, I will at least be the [only] one who knows that I didn't do it.

MS: That's right. Exactly.

QT: And it's sort of like me testing my talent. Am I going to hit the ceiling on this one? Am I not as good as I think I am? And just before those days, those sequences, are always my most anxiety-filled, because I want them to be great and I'm at the bottom of the mountain right now and I'm looking up. I know once I start climbing, I'll be fine. But I've got to start climbing. You have to get through that…

MS:[laughing] It's true, and it's total anxiety, bad dreams, everything. Get in there in the morning. Nasty, arguing, complaining. And then I want to get started.

QT: On those mornings, I am the nastiest. I am like, "Don't bother me." 

MS: "Don't come near me." [laughing] I go outside the trailer. I'm very nice to everybody. I go in the trailer, there's my AD and my producer, my assistant, and they get it. And then the DP comes and they all get it. And I usually complain about the traffic or there's something wrong with my teeth or I don't know what. "Can't do a damn thing around here," you know.

QT: Yeah.

MS: But in any event, it is that incredible thing that I always talk about: How do we get these concepts up here, out through all this equipment, through that lens, with the glass, and how do we get these dreams in our head? It's so ephemeral.
Once you start to make them physical, we may lose part of what we're feeling up here, what we want to express. It's very tricky.

"I'm interested in that whole concept of the New York New Wave, and you guys more or less being inspired by the can-do spirit of the French New Wave."–Quentin Tarantino

QT: It's an interesting double-edged sword which, I think, is why we have the anxiety, because, on the one hand, we've got this perfect movie in our head, but we don't want that. We want to create something better than that because we don't have those actors in our head.

MS: Exactly.

QT: You've got to constantly [be] making the cuts with the music and this and that and the audience ooh'ing and aah'ing. Yeah, we can maybe do that. But it's got to have a heartbeat.

MS: That's right.

QT: But I still want all that ooh'ing and aah'ing.

MS: Yeah, I know. I know, I know. And that's the tension. That's the incredible tension. And people say, "Well, if you hate it." It's not that I hate it.

QT: No, it's not hating.

MS: It's what we do.

QT: It's actually the most invigorating thing in my life. But it doesn't mean I don't have trepidation.

MS: Oh, God. But you know, you've tried your best under the circumstances: with the DP, with your actors, with the weather, with how you're feeling, with that location, with that shooting schedule. Unless, you know, some people go back and they reshoot a lot of stuff that they really need.

QT: Yeah, it seems like cheating to me. There is an aspect of, "No, you've got to pull it off in the time—either one that you said that you were going to [meet], or while everyone's all there to do it. Even if you go over, it's still…

MS: That's right. It's like a prize fight.

QT: Anybody could just do an unlimited thing…

MS: Yeah, no, a prize fight. You've got certain rounds. You've got to get in there and you've got to keep going and that's it. I mean, I did shoot four extra days, I think, on The Departed. But what I did there, we were changing it so much in the middle of the film when we were shooting. I kept working with [screenwriter] Bill Monahan and everybody rewriting stuff. It got so complicated that, at one point, my continuity person said, "Where do you want this new scene [that] just came in?" I said, "Put it in the middle with everything else. [laughing] I'll figure it out later." Sure enough, in the end it was like we were wrangling six wild horses, me and [editor] Thelma [Schoonmaker]. And then finally, we put it all together and we realized, "Okay, we need this and we need that."

QT: Yeah, that makes sense, absolutely. I would have to think, though, that when it comes to what I was describing about leading up to that big section, feeling trepidation, I would imagine that you probably felt that way leading to the big action climax of Taxi Driver.

MS: It was every day on Taxi Driver. It was supposed to be a 40-day shoot and we went 45 days and they were very, very upset with us—really upset, angry, coming down, phone calls. It was a nightmare. And I must say, the energy you see in the frames—and I designed that whole shootout sequence very carefully—there was a good kind of anger that kept us going.

QT: Yeah.

MS: It took a lot out of us, but it was like being in a battle. It was fight, fight, fight, all the way through everything. It's like everything you did was a battle to get the shots you wanted, how you wanted it. We were just trying to fight the time.

QT: Yeah.

MS: But it had a crazy energy to it. Because of that, we were like commandos.

QT: That makes sense, in particular that cathartic action scene and pulling it off, because it's, on one hand, operatic, even Japanese style to some degree.

MS: Yeah, yeah.

QT: But also more realistic than anything I'd ever seen in just a normal, go-to-the-movies kind of movie theater experience. That ending has got to be cathartic. That brings all these elements together. Also, you're giving us an end to a movie. We've watched this guy in his apartment forever and now this it, the fuse has met the bomb basically. 

MS: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing was, [Paul] Schrader wrote that and it was very, very personal. And he had imagined—I'm putting words in his mouth I guess—but the impression I got was he wanted it more Japanese and more stylized. And he, I believe, said he would have wanted more blood on the walls. I said, "But I'm not Kon Ichikawa. Or [it's not Kurosawa's] Sanjuro

QT: Yeah, where you trigger the sprinkler system basically.

MS: I watch those things. I said, "I can appreciate it. I love it. But every time I try to do it, it comes out another way." Because where I come from, Quentin, when I saw violence or the threat of violence, it was very real.

QT: Yeah.

MS: Very serious and there were great repercussions. And, you know, problems that dealt with that, whether it's a slap in the face or a look, even, boom!, people just stopped, and you could be dead the next minute. You don't know. I just did it the way I imagined… as if it would happen realistically.

QT: I heard you say at the time that you were kind of disturbed that audiences were thinking [of the scene] cathartically but, to me, it seems like it is made to be cathartic.

MS: But I didn't know that. I thought it was a special passion project that had to be made because we all had those feelings. I had feelings of this disconnect and this rage. But the rage, I mean, ultimately, we don't cross that line that [the title character] Travis crosses. But we understood it and we didn't have to say much about it.

QT: Yeah, yeah. You just didn't know how much you would actually tap—how deep the vein was.

MS: I thought nobody was going to see the film.

QT: So my question, in Taxi Driver, it's like I'm sure the reason the movie, when it came to actually getting made (at Columbia) because it is vaguely similar enough to Death Wish

MS: (Producers) Michael and Julia Phillips, who had just won the Academy Award for The Sting, were really pushing the picture and working with the people at Columbia—at that time it was David Begelman—and they got it made. But [the studio] did not want to make it, and they made it very clear every minute.

QT: Oh, really. [laughing]

MS: Every day. And especially when I showed it to them, they got furious, and [it] also got an X rating. And I always tell the story that I had a meeting with Julia and myself and the Columbia brass. They looked at me. I walked in, ready to take notes. They said, "Cut the film for an R or we cut it. Now, leave." 

QT: Jesus!

MS: I had no power at all. There's nothing I could do. I came up against a monolith, and the only people who were able to pull it through were Julia and Michael. But meetings, talks, and then, of course, dealing with the MPAA to shave and trim a bit here and there. Again, because, in doing the shootout, I didn't know how else to present it. Maybe knowing that some of it was artifice, I didn't realize the impact of the imagery. So I cut two frames and walked out.
I mean, the violence, it's catharsis, it's so true. I felt it when I saw The Wild Bunch.

QT: Well, that's an interesting thing. For instance, I feel a catharsis at the end of Taxi Driver.

MS: And the character (in Taxi Driver), 80% or 90% of it was De Niro himself.

QT: Absolutely.

MS: With that look on his face and his eyes.

QT: It's interesting because the thing about it is, you, De Niro and Schrader made a choice to look through Travis' eyes. [De Niro] went inside of Travis. This is a first-person study. You're seeing the world through his eyes. So if he's a racist, you're looking at the world through the view of a racist.

MS: Right, exactly.

QT: Nevertheless, though, in Travis' one-against-all stand against the pimps, I'm on Travis' side. I mean, if we're not supposed to root for him even a little bit, then there would be no point in making the prostitute underage.

MS: No, you're right, that's something that Schrader had in that script with her being underage, and Harvey improvised some of those lines about, you know, when Bob goes up to him in the doorway on 13th Street and says, 'I'm hip,' but (Harvey) goes—

QT: 'Yeah you don't look it.' I've got to say I love that movie and I love that sequence in particular. Usually, if you're talented enough, you get enough happy accidents you can never count on, so it all balances. But I think one of the great ones to me in the history of cinema is (Harvey Keitel's) Sport flicking that cigarette off of Travis and you see an explosion of sparks.

MS: The sparks. Harvey did it. "Bang!" You know, "Go back to your fucking tribe." You are so right about that, you know, because I grew up in places where I saw that happen in gatherings or a dance or something, and a fight breaks out. Before it breaks out, there's always that cigarette. A spark. "Oh, here we go." It's one of those [situations] where you know it's going to be a war and that's the signal, you know.

Referencing Other Director in Their Own Movies

QT: From time to time, if I'm in a really cool cinema bookstore, I like picking up a critical essay book on a director that I haven't watched their films that much. And I'll just kind of start reading about them and that will lead me down the road to another filmmaker's work. And so I was in Paris for our one weekend of shooting in France for Inglourious Basterds, and they had this wonderful cinema bookstore by Rue Champollion, where all the little cinemas are, and I hadn't watched a lot of Josef von Sternberg's movies. So I picked up one book about him and I liked it so much I got another book. I eventually got his autobiography, which I thought was hysterical. I don't believe a word of it, but it's very funny.

MS: [Laughing] I know, I know.

QT: Not a word. So I started watching some of his movies, and I was actually kind of inspired by his art direction.

MS: Yes. 

QT: So I started, and now I do it at least a couple of times per movie, but on Inglourious Basterds, it was set up to do this Josef von Sternberg shot where you take all of the art direction and put it in front of the camera. And you dolly shot through the art direction as you follow your lead character—all the candles and the glasses and the clocks and the lights and just create one big line and then put a track line in there and then have your character go like this. So that is officially a Josef von Sternberg shot.

MS: I have a thing with tracking parallel to the action—just tracking it, like four people are standing there. Instead of tracking this way, it just goes straight this way and I think it comes from… there's a scene in Vivre sa vie where the guy says, "I want a Judy Garland record," and she goes across the record store to find the record and then the camera just comes back with her. There's an objectivity to it that is like a piece of music really, like choreography, but also the objectivity of this, I should say the state of their souls in a way—it doesn't want to get too close.

QT: Yeah.

MS: But the one I really tried to—I tried to capture it in many films. I can't do it but it doesn't matter. It's the fun of doing it. There's one shot in (Hitchcock's) Marnie where she's about to shoot her horse. And it's an insert. And it's her hand with a gun and the camera is on her shoulder and it's running. The camera is moving with her and the ground is going this way and I've done it in practically every picture. There's something, the inevitability of that that she hasn't—somehow it looks [like] I've put the actor on dollies…

QT: Yeah.

MS: The camera floating up. I'll never get it right because Hitchcock did it. But it's so much fun to do.

QT: I've had a situation like that that I've done for like the last three movies. And this movie is the only time I think I've gotten it right. And it's not even for one of his movies per se; it was from the trailer to [Sam Peckinpah's] Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and the way they cut the trailer is you see Kris Kristofferson like in 24 frames a second doing tumbles and rolls as he's shooting, then [James] Coburn's in the hideout and bullets are all around and he's running in 24 frames a second, somersaulting and shooting and then it cuts to people getting shot in slow motion.

MS: Yeah.

QT: And then it cuts back to Kristofferson—24 frames, bam, bam, bam. And then it cuts to him hitting the ground and falling at 120 frames.

MS: Wow.

QT: I've tried that juxtaposition and doing it that way. I tried that in Django and I didn't pull it off. I tried it in Hateful Eight during a shootout and it worked but it didn't work that way.

MS: [laughing]

QT: But, when Brad Pitt beats the fuck out of this one Manson guy in (Once Upon a Time…), I finally pulled it off. His punches are 24 frames, the guy's impact into the powdery dirt is 120 frames.

MS: That's great. Oh, the powdery dirt, you're right, it pops up—ah, that's fantastic.

QT: Yes.

MS: I always think of the powdery dirt.

QT: The blood on the sweaty face—

MS: That's great. I can never do it but the little Mexican boy in [Sergio Leone's] Once Upon a Time in the West and when it's revealed that his brother is being hanged.

QT: Oh, yeah, yeah.

MS: And he's on his shoulders and he falls to his knees when he's shot with the dust. I tried.

QT: Oh yeah—impossible.

MS: I tried even it in Last Temptation of Christ; didn't work. Mary and Martha came, Jesus is coming to raise Lazarus. It didn't work. We were in Morocco. Harvey was with me. We couldn't get it. Never do. Maybe it's the dust. I don't know what it is.

QT: Yeah, it's that hard dust. Right? You need that Spanish [dust]. You need Almería dust.

MS: Spain. Oh, God. That's hysterical. 

"How do we get these concepts up here, out through all this equipment, through that lens, and how do we get these dreams in our head? It's so ephemeral."–Martin Scorsese

Working with DGA Teams

QT: In the last couple of movies [Tarantino's longtime 1st AD William Paul Clark is among the first to see a screenplay], because I know he's going to do it— while he's here. And so those first five or six people, I invite over to the house to read the script. It's a big deal. 

MS: I've worked with wonderful ADs for a long period of time. Worked with Joe Reidy, who was terrific. He helped with so many [movies], from Color of Money all the way up to Shutter Island. And he was even—him and [DP Michael] Ballhaus are the ones who laid out the entire Copacabana shot [in Goodfellas]. And Chris Surgent [2nd AD on Gangs of New York and Bringing Out the Dead]…

QT: Yeah.

MS: Then I worked with Adam Somner, who is really terrific, on Wolf of Wall Street. And, since then, David Webb who [was] with me in Taipei doing Silence [and was on] Vinyl and, of course, Irishman. Yeah, Irishman, which I found that the AD is really like [a] co-producer in a sense. They're like my right arm. And so I've been very lucky in these past 25 years to be dealing with them.

QT: I just watched New York, New York a few months ago with my wife. She had never seen it. Now, whenever I watch it, I don't even think about watching the theatrical cut. I always watch the "Happy Endings" cut. 

MS: That's the right one. Yeah.

QT: But it breaks my heart that you felt the need to cut it out before the theatrical release. And I get it. I can [also] see that it would even be one of the reasons that you made the movie, for the opportunity to do the "Happy Endings" number.

MS: That's the key reason, yeah. I think what had happened at that point was… Sorry, go ahead.

QT: Well, you're backed up against the wall. 'What do I do?' OK, well, this will take 20 minutes out of it.

MS: I was experimenting so much with the film and by the time the editing was coming to a close, everybody always commented how wonderful that sequence is, etc. And they said, "Sometimes you have to cut out the best thing to make it work." And so I did. And it was almost like [I] was really punishing myself for the whole situation, really. I never meant that that should be out and, in a funny way, too, when we put the film back together a couple of years later, the "Happy Endings" [sequence] gave the audience a kind of appreciation for the relationship and they got a happy ending because the ending is not happy in a sense.

QT: You've also got a really smooth filmmaking thing there where it shows Francine's (Liza Minnelli) journey from Broadway to movies, because it starts with (De Niro's character Jimmy) going to the Broadway show and then it ends with him being in the theater watching the movie version.

MS: Watching, yeah. That was very specific, you know, it was inspired by [the] "Born in a Trunk" [number in George Cukor's A Star Is Born] and it was inspired by the "Girl Hunt Ballet" [number in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon]—all these sequences that would stop the movie and suddenly a whole other film would appear. And that was one of the main reasons for making the picture, really, to be able to explore that and work with the great [production designer] Boris Leven and [DP] László Kovács and, I mean, the design of it was beautiful.

QT: I'm always curious, especially when it comes to filmmakers whose work I've studied, you hear about different iterations that could have happened with [one of] their movies. That brings me to [an aspect of] Mean Streets that I've never heard you talk about, when you went to Warner Bros. to do it and the period of time that Jon Voight was going to play Charlie. Will you explain how it didn't happen?

MS: Well, it's a delicate issue because, around that time, I got to know Jon Voight in Los Angeles a little. Harvey Keitel, all of us together, and it was constantly, "What if so-and-so's in it? Maybe we can get financing. What about this? What about that?" And Voight was a wonderful actor and so we talked about it for quite a while. And he was really thinking about it. I went to his class one night and there I found Richard Romanus and David Proval and cast them [in Mean Streets] from his class. And then, you know, I spoke to Harvey about it because it was written for Harvey.

QT: Yeah, yeah.

MS: And Harvey told me, "Look, you've got to get the film made. And I understand, maybe if he does Charlie, I could do, you know, Johnny or whatever." We were working out something. And I said, "You understand that I've got to get this made." And even Barry Primus, we were talking about Barry doing it. And it was a matter of getting the financing, really. Damn good actors. And the night came finally when I had to shoot some background shots for the San Gennaro Feast, and we were based on the corner of Umberto's Clam House, where Joey Gallo had been killed six months earlier. And I was on a roof, I remember, and I was about to put a coat on Harvey and go in and shoot. But they said, "You know, Jon wants to talk to you one more time," Jon Voight. So I went downstairs to make a phone call and he said, "I'm really sorry. I just can't do it." I said, "OK." I thanked him, hung up. I went up to the roof, I said, "Put the coat on. Let's go. It was written for you, and that's the way God has worked out."

QT: I had another story like that. I make Reservoir Dogs and I'm making a movie for Live Entertainment, which was the video arm of Carolco at that time.

MS: Oh, God, yes. 

QT: And so it was like, we're not even guaranteed a theatrical release. It's like, well, "If it's really good, we'll release it. We'll see." So I'm ready to lock picture and Ronna Wallace, who was the head of the company—I had been kind of working with her No. 2 guy, which was Richard Gladstein—she was just like, "Well, these guys have been working really hard to get it ready for Sundance so let's not lock yet. And she's actually trying to be nice, like maybe I need another week or something. No, I don't need another week so it doesn't seem so nice. I went to lock. But she says, "Send a print to New York. I want to watch it." So we sent the print to New York, and she comes walking into the screening room with Abel Ferrara. And so Sally Menke, my editor, was like, "Oh my God, they're going to take the movie away from Quentin…"

MS: That's where they hit you, yes.

QT: Okay. So now they weren't doing that. She's just bringing a filmmaker she's also worked with that year to watch it with her, and say, "What do you think?" And so—I wasn't there—I hear about this story. They're watching the movie and then, when it's all over with, Abel Ferrara goes, "Ronna, it's great. Lock it. Release it!" And he just walks out of the room. And that was that. 

QT: So God bless him.

MS: Great! I have a screening going on right now; it's supposed to lock in tonight. The CGI took six months. So I'm going to go over there right now.

QT: Well, good luck. Break a leg and this has been so much fun. Thank you for doing this.

MS: You, too, thank you. I'll see you soon, I hope, if you come to New York.

QT: I definitely will. It's my pleasure.

Source: DGA