Watch Quentin Tarantino Talk About Film For Fifty Minutes At Cannes

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Published

May 27, 2014

You shot Marvin the face? You shot Marvin the face.

On the zeitgeist-defining occasion of the 20th anniversary of Palme d’Or winning gangster opus Pulp Fiction, writer-director Quentin Tarantino took part in a self-congratulatory press conference in Cannes over the weekend, speaking on a range of topics you’d find in an IMDB forum including the supposed death of film, what he might end up doing with the leaked Hateful Eight screenplay, and, naturally, himself.

If you don’t have fifty minutes to spare here are the three key takeaways.

Film is dead apparently…

“As far as I’m concerned, digital projection and DCPs is the death of cinema as I know it. It’s not even about shooting your film on film or shooting your film on digital. The fact that most films now are not presented in 35 millimetre means that the war is lost. And digital projections, that’s just television in public. And apparently the whole world is okay with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead.”

He has a lot of Hateful Eight options…

“I’m still in the process of writing it, finishing the second draft, and then I intend to do a third draft. Maybe I’ll shoot it, maybe I’ll publish it, maybe I’ll do it on the stage, because I realised it could work really well onstage. Maybe I’ll do all three.”

He loves re-watching his old movies…
“I watch my movies all the time, and I’m always – at home you have a whole lot of movie channels, and they show the films uncut and you just kind of hit the guide on your button and see all the movies playing for the next three hours going down the line. And you go down it and whenever I see one of my movies is playing, I’ll turn it on. Maybe I’ll watch it for a little bit, maybe I’m going through the scroll to see what else is on, but I always watch it, whenever it happens to come up. And sometimes I watch it for a bit and then I’m done, and sometimes I watch the whole thing. I hadn’t seen Kill Bill: Vol. 1 I think in a couple of years. I’d seen Kill Bill: Vol 2. I’d screened it just for myself on film in the last year. But Kill Bill: Vol. 1 I hadn’t. And I just noticed in 15 minutes it was going to be coming on, like Showtime 2, and I thought, Well, you know, I’ll watch it again and I’ll watch it through the opening credits, through the “Bang Bang You Shot Me Down” opening credits, and that will be it. Goddamn if I didn’t watch that whole motherfucking thing to the fucking end! And I mean right to the very end. The last credits. And, uh, I felt very, very gratified.”

And there’s a whole lot more where that came from…