I feel very lucky to live the life of an artist in this town, in this industry. I have no intention of ever being a director for hire. I just started guiding myself as things have gone on. One of the huge lessons I learned is that these writer-directors come out, and their films are idiosyncratic—they have a special voice and those first two movies are like that. But it’s hard work to go back to a blank page, to start from scratch every single, solitary time and make a great movie every time. There are exceptions. Woody Allen is one of them.
Related Content
More About
Not necessarily for the better.
I think he’s in a renaissance, except for Melinda and Melinda I loved Anything Else. But it’s much easier [for a director] to say, “What scripts are out there?” Either they buy it and rewrite it, or they work with a writer. And they get more movies made. That’s all well and good, but cut to 10 years down the pike, and all of a sudden, they don’t have that voice anymore. They’re sucking dick for the Man. I’m not interested in just doing a job or working with this actor just to work with them. I learned something after I did Jackie Brown—and don’t get me wrong, I love Jackie Brown. But when it was all over—even when I was making it—the fact that it was just a little bit once removed made me a little bit disconnected from it. That’s why I haven’t done another adaptation since then. I want to naturally fall into the next thing that’s going to turn me on.
Is there pressure on you to work more often?
No. I mean I don’t want another six-year gap like what happened between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. I make a movie every year and a half, two years. When I finish, I take six months of doing nothing, and that’s great. But you can live life while you’re writing. It’s a fun life, actually, ’cause I’m working and committed and passionate, but I go out and see friends. When I’m making a movie, the world goes away and I’m on Mt. Everest. Obama is President? Who cares? I’m making my movie.
Is it hard to maintain friendships when you work this way?
They understand. But I’m still a younger guy. I haven’t settled down, and these will not necessarily be the friends I have for the next 20 years. I don’t have a family. I’m still allowed to run away with the circus. The way I live my life, I like the yin and yang. Even though I quit school when I was in junior high, I’m an academic at heart, and my study is cinema. I’ve been writing a movie review book over the years, and I’m not in any hurry to finish it. I started writing the book because it wasn’t enough that I was just seeing movies—they were being lost to the atmosphere. It’s like my whole life I’m studying for a professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate.
If we meet again in 17 years’ time, will you have settled down?
We’ll see. There was a time in the early part of this decade that I kind of had baby fever. And it just didn’t work out with a couple of women. And now I don’t have baby fever. Not that I don’t want a baby, but, like a writer, I want it to be . . . let’s set this up a little bit more.
How do you look back on that 1992 Sundance Film Festival where Reservoir Dogs was first screened, and you were part of that group of young Turks?
Since then, and even then, we mythologized that Sundance, with all the directors that came out of there. We called ourselves the class of ’92. The thing about it was, I just assumed all those directors would be around with me for the rest of my career. I just bumped into Allison [Anders] a couple of weeks ago at Astroburger. Alex Rockwell, Tom Kalin. Gregg Araki’s still around and making movies. And even though he wasn’t at Sundance that year, I still consider him part of that group—Nick Gomez [Laws of Gravity]. He’s the one that surprised me the most when he drifted away. I thought, for sure, he was going to be around for a long time. I thought all of us were going to be around forever.
