In an interview with Charlie Rose, Tarantino admits that this first two jobs were in the adult entertainment industry. When he was 12, he drove around all night with the owner of a porn magazine collecting quarters from the magazine racks. His second job was as an usher at the Pussycat Theater in Torrance, California. Ironically enough, he doesn’t like porn.
In the same interview, he claims that he dropped out of high school to devote his life to movies because he was bored. It makes sense, since he has an IQ of 160.
He attended the 1997 Oscars with Mira Sorvino, who stopped to talk to a journalist on the red carpet. Before she could say anything to him, Tarantino grabs her arm and yells out “No, no, no, no! This is the one that I said wrote that story on my dad.” After some more yelling, he turns to the journalist and uses his entire body to spit on his face, and then walks off. Turns out, he had the wrong guy.
In a
2003 interview about Kill Bill Vol:1, things got loud when the interviewer Jan asked him about his stance on the movie being blamed for inspiring killing sprees. She became increasingly agitated with his opinion and began to make fun of him. When she bellowed out “Why the need for such gruesome, graphic violence?!” Tarantino responded, “Because-it’s-so-much-fun, JAN! GET IT!?”
In order to get his SAG card, he had to take some small roles. One of these roles was an Elvis impersonator on “The Golden Girls.” But he wasn’t like all of the other impersonators he acted alongside. He wore his own clothes instead of the flashy rhinestone getups most of them wore. In a 1994 interview, he explained. “I wore my own clothes, because I was, like, the Sun Records Elvis. I was the hillbilly cat Elvis. I was the real Elvis; everyone else was Elvis after he sold out.”
The majority of his movies involve a scene with a woman’s feet, and he has said in interviews that he enjoys filming this particular body part.
Tarantino wrote the original script of “Natural Born Killers” but he hated the re-working of it so much that he wanted his name taken off the script. His main concern was the scene where Rodney Dangerfield’s character is seen molesting his daughter Mallory. He has never seen the film in full;he walked out of the theater halfway through.
According to the book “Quentin Tarantino FAQ” by Dale Sherman, one of the producers of “Natural Born Killers” didn’t exactly get along with Tarantino. Don Murphy got a hold of his script for the movie and sought to get it produced, but after a series of events he believed that Tarantino was trying to sabotage the project. Known for having a loose tongue, Murphy began badmouthing Tarantino, trying to paint him a ‘a hack.’
Things came to a head when Tarantino confronted Murphy at a restaurant and began punching him. Harvey Weinstein broke up the fight, and the two shook hands and promised to stop bad-mouthing each other. However, after Tarantino said he ‘bitch-slapped’ Murphy on television, Murphy sued him for $5 million.
His friend Robert Rodrigeuz scored the soundtrack for “Kill Bill” for a whopping fee of $1. In turn, Tarantino directed a scene in Rodriguez’s film “Sin City” for the same price.
One of his loves is ‘Ozploitation,’ or Australian 1970s/1980s cinema. In 1971 the Australian government gave tax breaks to anybody who made a film boosting cultural industries, and it just so happened to coincide with a time when their censorship laws were extremely liberal. He pays homage to the films in a lot of his masterpieces. In ‘Kill Bill Vol:1,” the ‘spitting scene’ is a tribute to the 1978 film “Patrick.”
He almost had his nipple bitten off by a cab driver. No, really. According to Tarantino, things escalated when the cabbie made a joke about the girl he was with at the time. This really pissed him off and he challenged the driver to a fight. He punched the cabbie, who then retaliated by taking a hard bite into Tarantino’s chest. Tarantino said about the incident, “The only reason he didn’t fuck me up was because he was too greedy. He took too big a bite.”
After watching “Reservoir Dogs,” Madonna who was the subject of the opening dialogue, sent him a copy of her album “Erotica” and said, “To Quentin. It’s not about dick, it’s about love.” The first conversation is a debate about whether or not “Like a Virgin” is about a girl who likes a well endowed man.
Calvin Candie is the first character he’s ever hated. The villain in ‘Django Unchained’ played by Leonardo DiCaprio. When speaking with journalist Michael Fleming, he said “I hated Candie, and I normally like my villains no matter how bad they are. I see their point of view, but I hated it so much. For the first time as a writer, I just fucking hated this guy.”
He kept the Pussy Wagon from “Kill Bill,” and drives it around Malibu.
