Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) by 2013 (updated)

Author:2013 (updated)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

Quentin Tarantino: Press Conference on Jackie Brown

Transcribed by Peter Keough / 1997

Quentin Tarantino answered questions about Jackie Brown at a Miramax Films press conference at Los Angeles’s Wilshire Regency Hotel in early December 1997, several weeks before the film’s Christmas Day opening in New York and LA. Reprinted by permission of Peter Keough.

Q: After Pulp Fiction, weren’t there a lot of expectations for your next feature?

A: It all boils down to the work you want to do, the work that speaks to you. I didn’t want to follow up Pulp Fiction with another epic. I wanted to do something smaller, something more character-oriented. If Pulp Fiction was an opera, Jackie Brown is more of a chamber piece. However, if I had come up with an original story in epic scope I liked, I would not not have done it because of the movie I’d done before. Maybe if I’d done five movies that were of a similar nature, maybe I’d change the sixth. I’d probably get a bit more self-conscious. But not after just two movies.

Q: Will some fans be disappointed that it’s not an original? That you’re recycling?

A: It’s an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch [1992]; that’s not a recycling. I think a lot of fans have been waiting to watch me tackle Leonard’s work because of our like minds and sensibilities. Also, original writers need to do an adaptation, or something along those lines, every once in a while so a certain sameness doesn’t creep into the work. Every Stanley Kubrick movie is an adaptation of a novel; he only does adaptations. As an actor, as a director, as a writer, you try to be as different as you possibly can, show as many faces as you possibly can, but at the end of the day it’s all still coming from the same well. This piece is me; and, in its own way, Jackie Brown became more personal in some areas simply because of the once-removed quality to it.

Q: What was the first Pam Grier movie you saw?

A: Coffy [Jack Hill, 1973] was the first. I saw it at the Carson Twin Cinema; I’ll never forget it. A double feature with The Mack [Michael Campus, 1973]. My two favorite blaxploitation films! I also saw Foxy Brown [Jack Hill, 1974] and Pam’s women-in-prison movie, The Big Bird Cage [Jack Hill, 1972], and Black Mama, White Mama [Eddie Romero, 1973]. I’ve just been a big fan for a long time. She is a truly great icon, and she holds a very special place in cinema history. When the blaxploitation phenomenon was going on in the seventies, you had Jim Brown, probably the single biggest star, and they would always say about Brown that he’s sort of the black Clint Eastwood. Fred Williamson had the mantle of the black Burt Reynolds; Jim Kelly was the black Bruce Lee. But Pam Grier wasn’t the black version of anybody, because there had never been a heroine who specialized in doing action movies, a full-on woman who didn’t try to act like a man.

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