say, “Yes,” other times, “No.” A moviemaker
could spend 20 minutes giving audiences ev-
erything they need to know about a character,
he says, but the thing is, “You won’t really
know what backstory will look like until after
you shoot the movie and you’re editing it. It’s
there in the script, it informs everything. But
it’s not for the audience. They won’t care.”MASTER AND STUDENT
I think back to when Tarantino called
Kill Bill “a personal film.” Kill Bill—you
know, the one about an enigmatic and deadly
woman called The Bride (Uma Thurman) who
blazes a trail of bloody vengeance against a
squad of assassins after they nearly kill her
and her unborn baby. Some autobiography.
In his journey as a self-taught moviemaker,
though, lies a curious recurring theme: Like
The Bride, who’s at once scarily skilled and
eager to learn from martial arts sages more
seasoned than she, Tarantino is most comfort-
able as both master and student, wielding a
double-edged sword of hubris and humility.
“I like to think of myself as a combat
surgeon who ended up running a college
medical facility. You learn on the battlefield,”
Tarantino says. Starting from Kill Bill on, he’s
always introduced at least one new task to a
production that he didn’t know how to pull
off. “I can write something on the page, and
I might think I know how we’re gonna do it,
but I don’t know how the fuck we’re gonna do
it!,” he admits. “It’s always me testing myself:
‘Well, how good of a filmmaker are you?’”
He knew that shooting an extravagantly
choreographed fight sequence—set in
a Japanese Yakuza hideout, the House of
Blue Leaves—with one camera “would be
the Damocles over my head, so I wanted to
shoot it as soon as possible.” It would take
his crew forever to finish, but when they do,
they’ll know, “We’ve done it!,” he says. “We’ll
have this sense of confidence—maybe even62 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COMLEFT: COURTESY OF MIRAMAX / PHOTOFEST; RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW COOPER / COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENTshoot blind, Tarantino explains, each arbiter of
the scene could neutralize each other arbiter of
the scene. Since The Hateful Eight is a murder
mystery, “keeping a sense of gamesmanship in
my approach to the material felt right,” he says.
Tarantino’s use of backstory got trickier still
while directing Samuel L. Jackson in the role of
Major Marquis Warren. A bounty hunter haul-
ing three corpses for cash to Red Rock, Warren
has his own agenda. After hitching a ride on
a stagecoach, he ends up stranded with other
shady characters at Minnie’s Haberdashery—
a lodge with a damned broken lock. “I took
Sam aside from the rest of the cast and said,
‘Look: I’ve got a whole other backstory for you
that has nothing to do with these guys,’” he
explains. “‘I don’t want them to know jack shit
about what you and I are over here talking
about. You’re on your way to a whole other
movie—another movie you were going to be in,
and you never get there, because you get stuck
at Minnie’s. You’re coming from a whole other
perspective, so there will be certain things
going on in the scene that you know about, but
these other characters don’t know about. The
audience doesn’t know you know it, but you
and I know you know it.’”
Later in the shoot, Tarantino would occa-
sionally forget to keep their secret. “Every once
in a while, I would direct Sam to do something
in front of everybody else and he’d mumble to
me, ‘I don’t know, that doesn’t quite go with
the plan you and I talked about...’ I’d say, ‘Oh,
you’re right, forget that!’ ” He cackles at the
lengths they went to keep the cast and crew
guessing: “No one knew what the hell we were
talking about! They still don’t!”
Tarantino is often approached on set, he
says, by actors who ask, “It seems important
that you mentioned this in the script. Is there
any way you can write a scene so that infor-
mation can be gotten across?” Sometimes he’llFIGHT TO THE FINISH: TARANTINO (L) HAD STAR UMA THURMAN
(R), MARTIAL ARTS ADVISOR YUEN WOO-PING (C), AND CREW
SHOOT KILL BILL VOL. 1’S HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES FIGHT
SEQUENCE FIRST TO TAKE A SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
WITH THEM TO THE FINISH LINE, HE SAYS
hubris—from having done that big sequence
first, and that will carry us through the rest of
the movie. It would be like Coppola starting
his Apocalypse Now shoot with the helicopter
sequence and taking that accomplishment
with him all the way to the finish line.”
His “Damocles” on Death Proof was its car
crash: He knew he didn’t want to do it with CG
and wanted it all in-camera, but he’d never shot
one before, and “didn’t have a fucking clue” how
the characters who are ripped apart by the crash
in the scene would be ripped apart. (“FX artist
Greg Nicotero and I figured it out,” he starts,
before confessing, “Well... Greg figured it out.”)
On Inglourious Basterds, it was the film’s
climactic theater fire: “I knew we’d be scared
of it and every scene, every day would get us
closer to it. But we used the time we had dur-
ing the entire shoot to figure out how to make
it both spectacular and safe.”
On The Hateful Eight, it was dealing with
all that snow: “I’ve never shot in real snow
without a machine before, and now we have
to do it through the whole fuckin’ movie?!
That was one of the hardest things I’ve done—
shooting to the correct weather for those ex-
terior scenes. You never know more than one
day in advance exactly what the weather will
be like the next day. So if the sun’s way above
your head, you shoot scenes in the stagecoach.
If there’s snow falling, you finish one of your
scenes that you’ve already started, but have
to stop when the day is over. It was a real run
and gun approach.”
Before he knew any better, Tarantino
used to quarrel with cinematographer
Robert Richardson—who lensed all of his
films since Kill Bill except Death Proof, which
Tarantino shot himself—about what scenes he
wanted to do first. On the Hateful Eight set,
Richardson was giddy to see how much he’d
grown. “Bob said, ‘I can’t believe that you’re
so comfortable doing it this way. I’m so proud
of you!’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said,
‘You normally like to start a scene and don’t
do anything until you finish it, then you move
on to the next scene. But now you’re shooting
one side for this one scene and not picking it
up again for two weeks because it needs snow.
You’re not complaining, you’re not bitching
about it! You’re just doing the work!’ ”
This nurturing instinct comes naturally
to Tarantino’s closest collaborators: When
they’re not reverent peers in awe of his
artistry, they’re proud parents in production
and post, encouraging his best instincts and
saving him from the errors of inexperience.
He’s valued that guidance since his former
editor, the late Sally Menke, showed him the
ropes as they made Reservoir Dogs—a film
on which every stage he went through was“LOOKING BACK, I COULD’VE DONE THINGS DIFFERENTLY. BUT I MADE A DECISION THAT MY VOICE IS WHAT I HAD.”