10 Screenwriting Tips from Quentin Tarantino on how he wrote Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds

my advice as far as like when it comes to whatever it is you want to write or material you want to find or a story you want to tell or you want to do is what's a movie you want to see if you just truly love cinema with enough passion and you really love it then you can't help but make a good movie what's the movie that we have never seen because you haven't made it and make that movie [Music] i have i've gone i i do it differently than i've done it before uh i used to write all night that was kind of my thing or i'd go and during the daytime i'd write in restaurants or something like that and uh and just kind of being up all night was kind of part of it and then stopping for a while and listening to music and that was all part of it then somewhere around in glorious bastards i um started writing during the day and i would write on my uh i have a balcony outside of my um uh that has a place for a table and stuff and it looks up to the i live in the hollywood hills it looks up into the greenery there it looks really nice and it's uh it's really pleasant out there and i can play music and stuff it's so cool and so anyway uh uh so like say i start uh i started writing like say around you know 10 10 30 11 something like that and then i write till about uh you know five six or seven something like that but around around that time around five or six i'm i'm gonna stop for the day and what i do is i i stop for the day and then after a little bit of time of unwinding i go into my pool and i keep it all nice and warm there and everything and so i just kind of hang out in the pool and if i'm not done with something i think okay um what do i want to do what how how do i want to go further with this uh now that i've written the first pass on it what do i think about it how can i make it better is there another element i can bring into it did i uh do add too much to yeah and whatever i'm just uh looking at it critically and maybe i come up with some neat ideas and then i get out of the pool and i make notes on those neat ideas that i came up with like thinking meditating about it it actually is meditating um and then that's my work tomorrow when i get up all right or if i finished a scene okay boom boom that's done now that part of the story is done now i go in the pool and go okay what happens next what's the next thing and then i usually come up with a pretty good idea and then i make my notes and then that's the next day's work and that was never really the way i did it and that has come exclusively the way i did in glorious pastors and django and this and it it it truly brings a lot of joy to my life it's a really really lovely lovely way to work that makes me feel really happy and the thing is i know as a viewer the minute i start getting confused i check out of the movie emotionally i'm confused yeah if when i'm watching a movie and all of a sudden something starts happening where all of a sudden the story line and everything is i it gets confusing i don't know where i'm at when i'm watching it my you know you i think an audience has like this you know like almost like an umbilical cord to the to the screen and it gets severed when when confusion comes and therefore you lose them exactly and the thing is most of the time when you get confused when i get confused and that's severed it's basically because i'm not supposed to be confused all right that's like it's a mistake all right um however if you get confu there's no problem with being momentarily confused if you feel you're in good hands all right and i don't think my movie and and disagree if you please is that i don't think pulp fiction for all of its goings in and yeah around how it goes in this big circle i don't think it's hard to watch at all you have to watch it i i ask for you to watch it you can't like put this on video and like do the new york times crossword puzzle and watch the movie that's right all right i'll ask you put everything down and watch it give me two hours and whatever it is ten minutes exactly and then once you do that then you know you can follow it it's it's easy to follow it was almost via patti chai esky that i actually realized that i actually uh was not was a pretty good writer or maybe want to think about exploring this a little bit because how i actually kind of discovered writing dialogue is i used to be uh be an actor and i'd be in acting classes and um and so part of your thing in acting classes to drum up scenes to do and i always wanted to do scenes from movies and stuff and then i didn't have access to any scripts or anything like that so i would like go and watch a movie and then i could remember i had good memories i'd remember the scene so i'd go home and write the scene down and whenever i didn't remember i would just fill in the blanks myself well little by little i would just start filling in more blanks and more blanks and just kind of go off and do my own things and add to the scenes that was me first my first attempt at writing dialogue with stuff like that and i had forgotten i was doing a scene with from marty uh petty chairs marty in class and i was later i was talking to uh the guy did the scene with he goes um i mentioned what i just mentioned he goes you're you're as good as petty chaieski what are you talking about remember when we did marty and all of a sudden there's this monologue about the fountain yeah that's not in marty that's you i actually you gave me your handwritten version i actually have marty at home and i go there's this there's no fountain there's a monologue about a fountain in this scene but it fit in perfect with the scene and it was like what it's just as good as the patty chayeski stuff and it was literally it was his name was ron coleman ronnie coleman and um when he said that it was like the first dang little it was a little tiny dinner bell you know little you know like the one around the side of a table ding ding ding all right it was the first little ring that was like maybe i should pay attention to this maybe i should explore this a little bit more and so i thought the idea within the case of pulp fiction that would be kind of cool is to take three separate stories and and and make them be the oldest stories in the book you know whether it be uh vincent's character the the hoodlum has to go out with the boss's lady but don't touch her and there's a whole history of people who have touched her what happens well we've seen that before resilient times all right um and um in the case of uh the bruce willis story that's that's the boxers supposed to throw the fight and he doesn't and now the mob's after him we've seen that story a million times before and one of the things i thought about like the third story uh was basically kind of the beginning of at the time of almost every joel silver movie which would start off with like a couple of hit man showing up boom boom all right you want to win just something witness this and then they shoot the guy and then they cut dornal swishing or you're walking through the forest and eventually he's gonna meet those guys and so i thought well what happens if we hung out with them all night long all day long all right after they've killed the guy what happens with the rest of their day and so it was the idea of taking these these chestnuts and putting them together and then actually having the characters kind of intertwine and it all kind of takes place in one one city and it's an environment that they all live in and the characters kind of know each other but you don't know that for a while and i was just kind of hanging out with them for those two days your heroes are always anti-heroes they're almost always villains yeah i mean your your heroes are always so it's not dark exactly because they're kind of weirdly light villains i mean in terms of their happiness with villainy but they're never you know i mean again and again and again you wouldn't call them classic heroes i mean in the sense of the heroic leading man like frederick zoller yeah yeah yeah i mean is that something that you think about when you're writing i actually really try to um have morality not even be an issue at all all right when it comes to my character it's so interesting i mean you know i don't want that to have any play whatsoever i that would be me commenting on them right that is me sticking my big nose into their lives and then their philosophies i let them be who they are and you know my biggest feeling is you know i i just i just want the same rights that a novelist has i mean like we lived through the 80s we're like [ __ ] every hollywood movie everyone had to be likable and everybody had to be understandable and uh and the test scores were like oh we didn't like him so we got to change every goddamn thing you know and um i didn't make movies at that time but i was watching them and i'm not gonna make that crap and um and i just want the same freedom that a novelist has i mean you can make a novel you write a novel about a bastard but it can be totally interesting my advice as far as like when it comes to whatever it is you want to write or material you want to find or a story you want to tell or you want to do is what's a movie you want to see what is the movie that's some you know it's you know uh uh what is it you want to contribute all right uh and and and make it maybe just even slightly a little less about you yourself i'm assuming most you guys haven't made a feature yet all right so but there's a lot of features that have been made before you there's a whole lot of movies you could see a whole lot of movies you could watch without you what's the movie that we have never seen because you haven't made it and make that movie make the movie that it's the reason why you're gonna be doing it all right the truth of the matter is good bad or indifferent reservoir dogs didn't really exist before i did it heist films had been made and you know i there's a whole story about this hong kong movie city on fire if you've ever seen city on fire it's very very different from my movie the section that they say i took i did take from it all right absolutely i took from it all right but it's a very different movie they actually talk to the director ringo lam he goes wow tarantino took the last 10 minutes of my movie made an entire movie about it well that's a [ __ ] different movie that's very very different but the point being though is what i had to say in my kind of idea of crime films and my idea of dialogue you know there was barry levinson and tin men and there was good fellas and there was all kinds there's the david mamet stuff all that stuff existed that that was sort of like reservoir dogs but it wasn't reservoir dogs it didn't have this aesthetic that i that i'd been having you know because the thing is i wasn't being you know the movies that were collecting in my head for all the movies i saw i never saw them i saw a flash of them i saw a movie that would have a scene that would be the aesthetic that i was looking for or they would play a song in a movie and that would be the kind of song that i would use and it would have the kind of feeling that i'd want a song to have in one of my movies uh or a character would be the kind of character that i wanted to do a movie about not all the other characters just one character you know but usually like i said it was a scene it was uh a mood for only a little bit or a section of the movie but it was never the whole enchilada it was never that aesthetic that was in my head was never just there i mean if it was just there if two or three other people were doing it i might have been a filmmaker because i didn't need to get it out of my head and one of the director goes to have you done your subtext work no what's that ah you see you think because you wrote it you know everything but you don't know everything you've done the writer work you haven't done the director work you need to do your subtext work so he's describing this whole thing to me and i was you know still pretty young at the time you know and i was like oh wow is that really what a director does wow really tell me about it and so they're telling the whole thing and i was actually really kind of excited to go often and give this a shot so i took to me what i thought was like the most obvious scene you could possibly take i took mr white bringing mr orange into the warehouse all by themselves mr orange because he's a cop is saying plea and he's dying please please please take me to the hospital mr white because he doesn't know he's a cop he's like no no no i can't take you to the hospital i can just hang in there so i i could ask anybody in this theater here what does that scene mean if you've seen the movie and you could tell me but when you actually start putting pen to paper comes a different thing it actually a lot of stuff opened up that i hadn't thought about before because subtext is getting beyond what's the obvious there and so i wrote down what does mr white want from the scene more than anything else in the world what's miss orange one from the scene more than anything else in this world and what do i as the filmmaker want the audience to take away from the scene more than anything else in the world and just even writing the obvious [ __ ] about mr orange is dying and he wants to be taken to a hospital all of a sudden the more i wrote the more i realized that the movie was the father-son story and that mr white was functioning as mr orange father at that moment and mr orange was functioning as a son but he was a son who betrayed his father but his father doesn't know about the betrayal and he's trying to hide it from him as long as he can because the guilt is really starting to hit him yet mr white has faith in joe cabot lawrence turner who is his metaphorical father in this situation and what does he keep saying they're looking just don't worry about it wait for joe to get here when joe gets here you're all going to be fine it's all going to be fine and what happens when joe gets there he kills mr orange and then actually mr white has to choose between his father his spiritual fa his metaphorical father and his metaphorical son and naturally he chooses his metaphorical son and he's wrong but he's wrong for all the right reasons that was pretty heavy that's fascinating and that was pretty heavy and me as a student at sundance is in my little bungalow in the snow and i'm writing all that and i was like wow that's really cool that that's that's deep there's a lot of there there well i'm glad to know my work has such depth i'm glad to know that the roots extend that far deep but i never want to know about those roots again because i know they're there and i don't want to tell a father-son story i want to tell my gangster story i want to tell my high story the father-son story will take care of itself the father-son story is for everybody else who invest in it and the father-son story is there because it is deeper than just a robbery but me i want to deal with the robbery and let the other guy who's doing the writing who knows about the roots deal with the roots unbelievable most of the characters in the movie are given choices to make and they make the choices that they make and they pay and they pay the price or the consequences or they live to tell the tale uh because of those choices and we actually see it happen all three different times in the movie and uh but actually but it's it's funny though if you if you just take that for what it is if you just look at the case of john travolta and sam jackson it would suggest well okay sam jackson made the good choice made the right choice unless he prospers and john travolta pays no attention to it and thus we know he dies but you have to but you have to think about bruce willis choice that happens in this movie because he actually makes two choices one he makes it a choice to do a very an honorable thing you know he actually makes the deal with marcellus wallace to throw the fight he doesn't have to marcellus doesn't say throw the fighter you're dead he makes it for money and he takes the money and he screws marcelo's woman um but he actually ends up living to tell the tale because he actually does make a moral choice later when he goes back to save marcellus but he's still starting from a very bad place and he actually ends up prospering you know for it but again he does make him you know he does make a moral choice that he doesn't have to um but if he had now if he had left that's i'm just thinking about it now if he had left the pawn shop and just let marcellus be buggered he just left that you know would he still get out of town you know with uh with fabian would he still make it to tennessee would he still have all the money and everything like that now he'd be looking over his shoulder now right now he's not looking over his shoulder because he did the moral thing he actually got away with it when i write a character that doesn't have a lot that doesn't say a lot doesn't get it across a lot in uh in dialogue and doesn't have that many story beats in order or this giant you know the other giant reveals are happening uh i tend to write those characters more prose like i tend to write them a little bit more like a novel all right uh uh you know and i'm i'm putting a lot of stuff in there that you guys the audience is never gonna see and you're never supposed to see it all right but it's it's there for the reader you know i i want the person who's reading the script to have a good time and to be engaged in the story and there's stuff for the reader that's meant for them and and and it's not meant for you and there's uh uh and uh but it's also it's meant for the actor and so it gives the actor like a sense of who this guy is and more than most other scripts like i said i did a lot of exploring with this by writing stuff that didn't doesn't even quite make the script like just to give you an idea um like i wrote a whole prose chapter of exactly what happened on the boat with uh i written like like the first chapter of a book all right it was called misadventure [Music] [Laughter] and there you find out exactly what happened i'm not telling you guys all right but brad knows you know uh um and i you know and it was all it was all it's all it was all done as it was all done as pros and it was like a little chapter of a book and he got a real sense of it all right in the case of uh describing rick dalton's career for example and like the career the his filmography his situation that he had the situation that he got to the situation he has now i wrote i wrote that as not just like a chapter in a book i wrote it like a chapter of a film book like a film book about rick dalton it was called the man who would be mcqueen [Laughter] and uh and frankly to tell you the truth it was it was when leo read that is what finally pushed him over the edge to say yes you know uh uh to the character because then he had a sense of it and it was literally written as if like you know uh like tim lucas in a video watchdog has written like a chapter on the career of rick dalton you don't have to know how to make a movie if you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion you can't help but make a good movie you don't have to go to school you don't have to know a lens you know a 40 and a 50 and a [ __ ] all that [ __ ] crossing the line none of that shit's important if you just truly love cinema with enough passion and you really love it then you can't help but make a good movie hi everybody thank you so much for watching we really dug deep to find you only the most valuable screenwriting piece of advice from quentin tarantino and we found a lot of hidden gems from this screenwriting mastermind so we made another video with an additional 5 screenwriting tips from quentin tarantino for our patreon supporters the link to our patreon page is in the description below let us know in the comments from what screenwriter or film you want to learn screenwriting lessons in our future videos keep writing and see you in the next video

Channel: Outstanding Screenplays

Views: 350,333

Rating: 4.9692287 out of 5

Keywords: video essay, screenwriting, screenwriter, analysis, screenplay, scriptwriting, screenplays, screenplay tips, quick tips, how to write, cinema, scriptwriters, writing, film, lessons from the screenplay, studio binder, oscars 2020, script, tips, story, oscars, review, how to, outstanding screenplays, filmmaking, tarantino interviews, pulp fiction, once in hollywood, motivational video, reservoir dogs, quentin tarantino advice, 10 tips from tarantino, tips from screenwriters, directors chair

Id: WSpqFn5TRCk

Length: 21min 10sec (1270 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Then_Data8320]

I already watched it before.

It's quite nice what he say about how passion is the main driver.

​

tip 1 - 0:38​ - Develop your own writing process that makes you happy.

tip 2 - 3:04​ - Don't confuse the audience.

tip 3 - 4:20​ - Rewrite other scenes and fill in the blanks.

tip 4 - 6:07​ - Take the oldest stories in the book and reinvent them.

tip 5 - 7:25​ - Take morality out of the question to have interesting characters.

tip 6 - 8:51​ - Write the movie you want to see.

tip 7 - 11:45​ - Do your subtext work.

tip 8 - 15:58​ - Give your characters moral choices.

tip 9 - 17:37​ - Write extensive character backstories to get the best actors.

tip 10 - Love what you do.

[u/Then_Data8320]

What he say about subtext is important.

Subtext is something I can think naturally while writing, but I know I never think enough about that. I also see it's a weakness many writers have. It's difficult to check. Often, the scene is written, I need to check after, and do self-analys of the content.

He resume well how subtext will easely come in a dialog. So, you can write it naturally. If the goal or personnality of characters are well made.

Don't confuse the audience.

I watched so many confusing content. By mistake or on purpose. Sometimes I can like, when it's on purpose and well done, rise a mystery. But most of the time, even on purpose, I dislike. I'm looking for writing in a way audience is fully immersed in the story.

Write the movie you want to see

Yes, so important. It's easy to get lost in a script, so we don't even remember why we write this. I think like this : I write this story, because I want to watch that. I want to forget the story I wrote and then watch it like any other people, and be amazed.