Entretien avec Deadline: QT (Vidéo)

Nearly 30 years after he burst onto the movie scene with Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino remains one of the few breakout directors from the 1990s to still be working at the top end of the studio system. After a brief wobble in the late 2000s with Grindhouse, his recent films have been his most successful yet. Although it has yet to catch up with his Blaxploitation spaghetti Western Django Unchained, his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, gave him the biggest opening weekend of his career when it was released in July.

Set in 1969 and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as TV Western star Rick Dalton, Brad Pitt as his stuntman Cliff Booth, and Margot Robbie as actress Sharon Tate, the film follows two days in the life of all three before fast-forwarding to the fateful weekend of August 8-9, when Tate’s home was invaded by a murderous hippie cult later known as the Manson family.

At Deadline’s recent The Contenders New York awards-season event, Tarantino explained that, although the film dealt with a lot of his favorite themes, it was no more personal than his previous films. “I think all my movies are personal,” he said. “Even the more genre ones — deep inside of it, there’s a personal skeleton. But this one, I’d had this idea in my mind for a while. It was the longest I’d worked on something since Inglorious Basterds. I think sometime around Death Proof is where I came up with the initial starting point of who these characters could possibly be. And then, in between projects, I would work on it and I would push the rock up the hill a little bit until I’d get to a certain spot and then I would stop it and then do the next thing.”
Regarding the character of Dalton, Tarantino spoke of his interest in faded stars. “I’ve always been kind of fascinated by actors that had, y’know, had their day,” he said. “Who either had a hit TV show or a good supporting role in a movie that made them pop. And then for a while it looked like they could transfer that into becoming a leading man and even maybe a movie star. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and then you see where the career ends up settling down. Some of them went back to television in a big way — they were able to get another big series. Some of them, though, couldn’t really land a series of their own, or they did and it didn’t last long, and so they were playing the guest stars. I always thought that would be interesting to explore.”

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