Tarantino gets Walk of Fame star – Director’s latest opus a classic roadshow fashion

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LOS ANGELES, Dec 22, (Agencies): Oscar-winning filmmaker Quentin Tarantino got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday, just days before the release of his latest movie “The Hateful Eight.”

Tarantino recalled to a crowd that had gathered for the event outside the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard how his parents used to take him to see films at the famed theatre, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or his first James Bond movie, “Diamonds are Forever.”

“The line went all the way down the block. And we stayed in that line, and at one point of that line, I stood right there,” he said, pointing to his star.

“So, I have called Hollywood my home even before I lived in this ZIP code for a very, very long time.”

The filmmaker, who dropped out of high school insisting he could learn more on his own, won Oscars for the black comedy western “Django Unchained” in 2013 and the black comedy crime film “Pulp Fiction” in 1995.

But his latest movie “The Hateful Eight” has received lukewarm reviews and was recently snubbed by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations, considered a bellwether for the Oscars.

Ever since “Reservoir Dogs” premiered at Sundance in 1992, providing the indie revolution with a populist shot in the arm much in the way “Bonnie & Clyde” foreshadowed the New American Cinema of the 70s, the Quentin Tarantino brand has endured. Mostly populated by misfits and renegades, guided by classic movie tropes and sparked by snappy repartee, Tarantino’s oeuvre exists in its own universe, where the tension between humor and violence is ever-present, loyalties are tested, revenge extracted and chances are a character with whom the audience has become invested will meet a sudden and gruesome end. Oh, and there will be blood — lots of it.

His latest opus, “The Hateful Eight,” shot in 70 mm Ultra Panavision and opening on Christmas Day at 100 theaters in classic roadshow fashion — replete with opening overture and an intermission — might be his most ambitious yet. It’s the third in a historical trilogy of sorts, but without the revisionist overtones of “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” which turned the tables on the Holocaust and American slavery, respectively. “The Hateful Eight” takes place in the snowbound wilderness of Wyoming during a vaguely post-Civil War time frame. There are no good guys and bad guys, only bad and badder.

Survivors

“It’s not like ‘Django,’ but they can’t help but be connected,” says Tarantino, who is being honored Dec 21 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “This movie deals with the Civil War and, in particular, its aftermath. All the characters are to one degree or another survivors of the war and survivors of the way their society had crumbled. The film almost plays like a post-apocalyptic movie to some degree, but instead of the Australian Outback (referring to the “Mad Max” movies), it all takes place in this icy, snow-covered wasteland. And the survivors of the apocalypse are all from societies that don’t exist anymore. And they’re all blaming each other for the apocalypse.”

“The Hateful Eight” contains all the elements one might associate with the Western, whether of the John Ford or Sergio Leone variety, at least externally: grizzled bounty hunters, a new sheriff rolling into town, the hanging judge who coldly dispenses frontier justice, the colorful array of duds that define each character, that big skillet of stew warming over the fire. But the film is also a mashup, and nothing is what it seems.

“I very much write like a novelist writes. At a certain point I let the characters dictate what’s going to happen.”

“This movie’s very tense and like a lot of my movies it has a few different genres inside of it,” Tarantino says. “It is on the surface a western but there is a horror film element, there’s a comedic element and then there’s absolutely a mystery element that comes into it, like an Agatha Christie piece, at some point in the film. But there is a tense horror thriller element going on, too. So much so that in the editing room, and I never do this, losing some jokes that actually worked to keep the suspense up. And I never lose my jokes.”

When he’s firing on all cylinders, Tarantino’s zeal can be infectious. In his review of “Pulp Fiction,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned a screenplay Oscar for the filmmaker and his then-writing partner Roger Avary, the late Roger Ebert hinted at how Tarantino’s process is both conspicuous and immersive. “Tarantino is too gifted a filmmaker to make a boring movie,” wrote Ebert, “he’s in love with every shot — intoxicated with the very act of making a movie. It’s that very lack of caution and introspection that makes ‘Pulp Fiction’ crackle like an ozone generator: Here’s a director who’s been let loose inside the toy store, and wants to play all night.”

To be sure, that slo-mo walk by the gang in “Reservoir Dogs” is endlessly emulated, while the filmmaker’s uneasy mix of murderous mayhem and black comedy is deeply embedded in the current TV landscape.

The chewiness of Tarantino’s dialogue can also be an actor’s dream, and his writing approach going in involves surrendering what might’ve been a grander design to the place where his characters take him. “I can do a pretty good job of more or less laying out what’s going to happen in the story and the characters at least until the midway point,” he says. “I very much write like a novelist writes. At a certain point I let the characters dictate what’s going to happen. It’s in the writing of it that they take charge and start having their own destinies and start telling me where they want to go.”

But his method is not so insular that he’s not open to suggestions. Stacey Sher — whose association with Tarantino dates back to “Pulp Fiction,” on which she served as an executive producer, and subsequently produced “Django” and “Hateful Eight” — says Tarantino likes to bring confidants into the process to gauge what works and what doesn’t.

“Sometimes he’ll call you up and read scenes aloud,” Sher says. “Or he’ll say, ‘Come over, I have 20 pages that I just typed up that I want you to read.’ Sometimes it’s just the process of him hearing where I laugh or what my reaction is to certain things. He’ll come in and watch me read sometimes, which can be unnerving.

“Once he’s finished the writing he looks at the (filming) process as sort of an adaptation; that directing is almost like adapting his screenplay to the screen.”

As much as Tarantino is revered by many critics as a kind of postmodern stylist with his own voice, the entertainment aspect of his work is paramount. The company he formed in 1991 with Laurence Bender, A Band Apart, might have been named after the Jean-Luc Godard classic of 1964, but Tarantino’s appreciation of the French New Wave is much closer to the film noir gangster dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville than the radical chic of Godard or the metaphysical musings of Claude Chabrol.

Unlike Godard, who deconstructed B movies with a heavy dose of irony, Tarantino reverently views crime sagas, Westerns and martial arts pics as building blocks for his cinematic vocabulary. While promoting “Inglourious Basterds,” actress Diane Kruger referred to Tarantino as “a living movie library,” and on “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” Samuel L. Jackson, who has played a role in seven of the writer-director’s movies, said, “Quentin will come in and describe a scene to you in terms of six different films.”

“He’s always keeping the experience for people in his head. He’s the only person I’ve worked with who is both audience and auteur.”

Tarantino says he’s “always dealing in genres. But I’m hoping to expand the genre. I’m hoping for them to exist a few notches above genre, but I don’t want them to be art-film meditations on genre. I want them to deliver.”

Adds Sher: “He’s always keeping the experience for people in his head. He’s really the only person I’ve ever worked with who is simultaneously both audience and auteur.”

As Tarantino’s canon has deepened, the production values have become more rich and accomplished. He recruited Italy’s greatest living movie maestro, Ennio Morricone, to create the first full-fledged original score in his movie canon for “The Hateful Eight.” And Tarantino admits that his collaboration with the d.p. R views “The Hateful Eight” as the culmination of all his experience to date, and he’s still shooting for the stars.

“Let me put it like this, in the case of ‘The Hateful Eight’: I think it’s my best script. And I think it’s my best directing of my own material. Does that make it my best movie? Well that’s up for the people who like my movies to decide. I think I got everything I wanted to get out of it in a really classy way.”

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