Quentin Tarantino Explains His Writing Process

[Music] before i settle in on what i'm gonna do i'm contemplating a lot of different things oh there's that book that i've always wanted to turn into a movie maybe i'd start reading that again and go over my old notes uh i i explore some different ideas you know see what stage and the incubator that they are at any given time especially when i'm looking for inspiration you know it's almost a metaphor for falling in love you date a lot of people and you flirt with a lot of people and everything's going great um but then you meet the right one and you once you once once i realized that oh okay uh this has grabbed me and oh this this is genuinely legit and now maybe i'm thinking about music choices for it and trying to find different music choices for it and web spinning about it and maybe it gets me to actually start writing a little bit and pretty shortly into that process i'll probably end up writing something that's like okay i'm doing this this is now what i'm doing it's not really i it doesn't do me much good to think too much past the middle i mean i might know where i want to go i mean i write genre pieces so you have an idea what the third act's going to be you know and kill bill i guess she'll probably kill bill at the end all right you know you know she's got a list she's going to work down the list all right so the big choice is well who's who on the list right um but you know a genre movie you think you know where you're going and you're probably right and you have an idea of how you might want the ending to end as for you know for both a movie and for an audience but for the most part you can kind of work out more or less what's going to get you to the middle but to think beyond that is kind of silly because um by the time you get to the middle when you've actually been writing it well it's a different story now it's a different thing now now you are the characters you know the characters things that you could never have known before you started writing are now they're in your blood it's like this entire month you know there is a mythology to my movies to some degree or another not mythology is delivered as as i write and i might have a checklist of things that i might want to do during the course of the time but some of them you know you know uh become irrelevant as you go on and when other ones take their place and some things that you thought could have been a big deal well they are a big deal and some things you about maybe half the reason you wanted to write it by the time you get to where that would happen it's for something else it's not for this um but by the time you get to the middle that's where you want to be you want to have the be this expert you want to be in the middle of the story you want to know who these people are and now with all this knowledge now you figure out where you want to go for the second half but i am trusting that i will know exactly what to do when i get there from having done the work one way or the other you know and uh but it's that trust you have to trust you have to trust you know that it's gonna be there yeah when you reach out [Music] i remember i was watching i was watching a movie once that was the director that did a talented job with it having said that he dealt with what he needed to deal with but i know that there was a lot of questions he didn't ask and i and i knew that when you create a mythology stuff forget about it that never will make it to the movie you need to know everything but in the case of me like i said if you're creating a mythology you got to know all the rules of that it doesn't matter what the audience knows they gotta know you know when i'm writing it's about the page it's not about the movie it's not about cinema or anything it's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and and writing a good page and making it work completely as a a literature document on itself that's my first artistic contribution and if i do my job right by the end of the script i should be having the thought you know if i were to just publish this now and not make it i'm done i've done it i could actually be okay with just saying that that's it now it's mine to f up if i go forward with it now i always go forward with it but i actually think you i for where i'm coming from i want to love that script so much that i i'm tempted to stop i'm tempted to call myself a winner right then and there so the point being of that is there's stuff that's in the script that i know will never ever make the movie but it just makes the the the book the the piece of literature better it's it's a better read it's a better it it's more emotionally satisfying i'm telling you so we don't tell a story we tell the situation most of the movies that you see now those and i'm not a hollywood bachelor because enough good movies come out of the hollywood system every year to justify its existence you know but they without any apologies however a good majority of movies that come out all right you pretty much know everything you're going to see in the movie by the first 10 or 20 minutes now that's not a story a story is something that constantly unfolds i'm not talking about like this quick left turn or a quick right turn or a big surprise i'm talking about it unfolds i like the way you die boy [Music] it's writing that's what writers do i i've never understood the concept of a screenplay just being a blueprint for the movie i do write them like novels i mean they're not it's not crazy pros you know that goes on forever but there is a commitment to the pros and um there is a literary narrator talking to the audience who is reading it and these scripts are meant to be read to such a degree that basically i've written a movie that really can't be done uh it's not it's so not a blueprint it is so a novel with the except with the exception of the dialogue broken down the way it is in a screenplay format that i am stuck on set every day adapting my novel into a movie every day and like big sequences i know will never i'm never going to film that you know but i don't know exactly which ones are going to be until i get there and then we cut them out of the project cut them out of them because movie will be too long be too much money to shoot that sequence but in the reading of the script they were important after a certain point it's the characters that are going through the story and they're telling me what's going on even in the case of like say the hateful eight without giving too much away there is a aspect of um there's a case of a poison pot of coffee i didn't know who poisoned the coffee for a long long time i didn't want to know i didn't do the mystery thing where you solve it all and then write backwards but not only that even in the case of the hateful egg as opposed to normally since no one the other characters can trust anything that the other characters are saying they are simply they say who they are and you have to take them as uh as that or not i didn't want to know any more than the other characters did about the characters so uh you know when chris manick shows up and says he's the sheriff is he is he not well i don't know yet i'm not sure i'm just only i only know what john ruth knows about him right i only know what major warren knows about him and all the way down the line even when it came to going arriving at minnie's haberdashery and there's four and there's four other people there i didn't know who those four other people were per se i let them reveal themselves to me by the time we did the movie i had to know who all those characters really were and where they came from in order for me to talk to the actors about it but in the first draft i didn't want to know any more than a viewer or one of the other characters would know [Music] most of these people that talk about writing for screenplays if they were teaching acting they would be thrown out and ridiculed they all seem to be result oriented and real actors aren't result oriented but real writers aren't result oriented i mean the actor wants everything they do to be magnificent and the writer wants everything they do to be magnificent but novelists aren't result oriented it's the doing of it it's the process it's the getting there it's it's the journey it's it's it's the journey is everything the journey makes the destination worthwhile you can only have a worthwhile destination after you've had a worthwhile journey and novelists trust that actors trust that they trust that they live the part and they are honest and they don't try to predetermine too much that the ultimately the ultimate end result will be rewarding and it seems like people who teach screenwriting go in the opposite direction if you're judging it by a coloring book and you're getting a's for keeping your colors inside of the lines then maybe they are right but i that's not how i want to judge it [Music] i think this just might be my [Music] masterpiece you

Channel: Tyler Mowery

Views: 531,958

Keywords: film analysis, movie review, tyler mowery, nerdwriter, lessons from the screenplay, every frame a painting, screenwriting, script breakdown, writing, workshop, writing course, teach screenwriting, oscar best screenplay, film school, quentin tarantino, kill bill, reservior dogs, django unchained, pulp fiction, hateful eight, inglouirous basterds, oscar winning screenwriter, tarantino novel, tarantino play

Id: 8MGGMmXeS6I

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2019