Hollywood's new hit men - writer-directors Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary and producer Lawrence Bender - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1994 by Godfrey Cheshire

RA: I love Hollywood.

QT: Me, too. At the end of the year, there's usually at least ten really good, straightforward, no-apology Hollywood movies that come out of the studios. I think that's a pretty good average. So the system, while it could be better, still functions. Enough good work gets done by people who care. But the thing that's really missing from the overall output, and that really comes home when you look at films of the '70s, is that we have lost the art of telling a good story well. There is no storytelling going on right now in 85 percent of the movies that are made.

GC: What you just said leads to what I really wanted to ask you about violence. If your primary gift is storytelling, how do you feel when people just look at the blood and go, "Oh, Quentin Tarantino--violence"?

QT: Well, it's a big fuckin' drag, all right?

GC: How do you react, though? Are you tempted to let go of the violence to prove what you're really about?

QT: No, no, I knew what I was stepping into. But the thing about it is, what do I do? Do I relish it and want to go even further in that direction? Or do I say, I'm gonna show you what I can do with a bedroom comedy--same kind of dialogue, same basic movie, but without the violence? Well, I think you're kind of a fool going with either of those things. You just, you know, "To thine own self be true."

RA: I'll tell you a passing thing about me. I don't intend to ever make another movie with guns in it, because whenever you fire a gun on a movie set it sucks three hours out of your day that you could spend working with actors, and that's the real fun of filmmaking. I can't imagine making Last Action Hero, for example. It would be my worst nightmare. And had I known how frustrating it would be and how much time it would take to have guns on a set, Killing Zoe wouldn't have had any guns in it.

GC: I've talked to people who consider the violence in Killing Zoe really objectionable. What struck me is that it feels violent because the movie is so intimate. You don't see that much violence, but what's there hits hard because the characters are real.

RA: You see a hell of a lot less in Killing Zoe than you see in Cliffhanger or Demolition Man [both 1993]. The reason people get freaked out about violence in movies is because obviously it touches them somewhere. As far as I'm concerned, we have equal amounts of good and evil in us, and it's important to know that we are partially evil as people. But we're also good. I think it was Joseph Campbell who said that the only real thing is the center, and everything else is just an apparition. Good and evil, right and wrong, black and white: Those things are apparitions. But you have to know your extremes before you can find the center. That's partially what I'm about and why I made the film I made. Some people have told me I'm a nihilist. But I'm not a nihilist at all; I'm an optimist.

GC: I didn't feel Killing Zoe was nihilistic.

RA: The people who get it think, "Oh my God, it's such a moral movie." The people who don't get it say, "God, you're so immoral."