If you’re a die-hard Tarantino fan, you’ve most likely come across a stack of wonderful and inglorious film reviews he’s been publishing on the website for his very own theatre, New Beverly Cinema.
Now, the director’s taken to the site to transcribe an old interview between himself and fellow writer-director, John Milius, from way back in 1982.
Quentin Tarantino digs up a whiskey-fuelled early interview with Apocalypse Now writer John Milius, and he hasn’t changed a bit.
The interview dates back to when Tarantino was just twenty years old, “and boy does it show,” he writes. A full ten years before making his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs (1992), the meeting partly takes place in the Paramount Pictures lot. “John and I sat in a duck blind all day, sipping whiskey out of a flask, talking about movies and shooting the tail feathers off of ducks,” Tarantino reminisces.
At 20, the director is astonishingly well-researched and has an impressive catalogue of reference material. Starting with praise for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, the dialogue swings towards Milius’ key inspiration and his thoughts on other directors.
Tarantino is bold, too. Discussing the director’s work, he doesn’t shy away from expressing his opinion, at one point saying to Milius:
“You describe yourself as a hopeless romantic. But to me the section in Dillinger that doesn’t work are the scenes in the middle […] it looked like you didn’t really have your heart in it.”
Milius then utters a line that Tarantino actually later used in one of his own films: “If people are loyal to each other that’s very meaningful.”
Twelve years later, Tarantino would bring the quote to life in Pulp Fiction, when Vincent Vega (John Travolta) utters it to himself in the mirror after his date with Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman).
Tarantino has said the interview transcript is “only part of it”, adding that he’ll transcribe more later.
Head over to the New Beverly Cinema website to read the full interview.
