Quentin Tarantino Receives American Riviera Award

Reviewed by Laura Wyatt. Attended tribute at Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2013

DiCaprio out, Tarantino in.

What a contrast of personalities. Leonardo DiCaprio is a suave, smooth, handsome well spoken young man. Quentin Tarantino, not so much! But you’ve got to hand it to Mr. Tarantino for stepping in when at the last minute Mr. DiCaprio was unable to attend his own tribute. The Santa Barbara International Film Festival didn’t miss a beat and had the programs not already been printed, you might not have known Tarantino was the second choice.

And what a second choice. The American Riviera Award was established to recognize an artist who has had a strong influence on American Cinema. I would argue that Tarantino has had a bigger effect on American Cinema than DiCaprio and Leonardo was being honored because he was presumed to be a bigger draw. Well the organizers of the festival may not have realized how big a draw Tarantino would be. Quentin was blown away by the turnout and kept saying he didn’t realize this was such a big deal. Mr. Tarantino seemed to be in awe of the crowd and in awe of his work. He clearly was enjoying the clips that had been put together to showoff his life’s work.

John Horn, a writer for the Los Angeles Times did the interviewing if you can call it that. He did ask legitimate questions but Tarantino seemed to have a hard time staying on topic and by the time he stopped talking, you had forgotten the question.

I am a fan of his movies but didn’t know a lot about him or his process and felt I walked away with a better understanding of him and his work. He likes to work in genres and says it takes discipline to work within one.  He considers his Kill Bill movies to be Martial Arts Films, Inglorious Basterds a war time movie and Django is clearly a western.

He considers himself a writer first and says he doesn’t suffer from writers block. Quite the opposite, he has too many ideas floating in his head. He writes chronologically and is worried he will mess things up as the director. He hand writes all his scripts because “you can’t write poetry on a computer, man”. He is protective of his words on the page and feels the “actors are there to say my dialog”. He doesn’t want any improv going on on the set, except maybe with the exception of Samuel L. Jackson, who he feels speaks his same language.

In fact, in Kill Bill he wanted Sam Jackson for the lead but realized that because of stereotypes and racial imbalance that it wouldn’t work to have a black man  killing white women. Another nugget about Kill Bill, was that he wrote that while he was dating Uma Thurman and most of the dialog came from things she said to him in their real life exploits. He loved that he wrote the script, but she was basically repeating verbiage she had already said.

Quentin is a quirky guy, whose mind is moving a mile a minute and has no filter on what comes out of his mouth. Some people will find him entertaining, some obnoxious and for sure, some will find him rude and vulgar. Just like his films.