The following conversation between directors Quentin Tarantino and Alexandre Rockwell was published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1993 issue, as these films hit commercial release. It is being reprinted today, as Reservoir Dogs celebrates the 30th anniversary of its premiere at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Friendship, loyalty, and honor–all are classic film themes which, ironically, can sometimes be hard qualities to find in the world of filmmaking. For every film that beats the odds and manages to get made, independent or otherwise, there are a hundred shattered deals, broken promises, and crushed filmmakers left in the shadows. This year two filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2022“I can’t imagine making a movie without him.” That’s what Quentin Tarantino said about first assistant director William Paul Clark, whose roots with the writer-director go back to Pulp Fiction. Since then, Clark has worked on nearly every Tarantino picture while also facilitating great work by a wide array of directors from Mark Pellington and Gregg Araki to Terry Zwigoff and Barry Levinson. As an enthusiastic cinephile with an infectious passion for both making and watching movies, Clark seems to have had the time of his life working with Tarantino on last year’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Taking on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 18, 2020The credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are filled with the director’s usual suspects. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Fred Raskin and assistant director William Paul Clark are among the consummate craftspeople who have spent at least a decade collaborating with the auteur. However, Hollywood also features a significant contribution from a new initiate to the Tarantino film family—production designer Barbara Ling. While Ling doesn’t share any work history with the director, the two are connected in another way. Both grew up in the Hollywood milieu lovingly resurrected in Tarantino’s ninth—and, if you believe him, next […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 10, 2019The following interview of Jim Jarmusch about Dead Man was published originally in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1996 issue. It is appearing online for the first time. Dead Man was reissued last year by and is now available from Criterion. In Jim Jarmusch’s new Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant who travels by train across the frontier West to work in a bookkeeping firm run by a crazed, gun-toting Robert Mitchum. When, as in a Kafka novel, the job vanishes before it’s even begun, Blake finds himself a hunted man, pursued for a murder he didn’t commit while […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 23, 2019Hawaiian shirts. Leather jackets. Go-go boots. These are just a few of the costume staples that leave a defining visual mark on Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film in which real history is viewed through a fictionalized lens. We are in 1969, a year of change — both in Hollywood and the U.S. Think the start of the Nixon presidency, the eroding of the studio system before the artistically adventurous New Hollywood came to the rescue and yes, the Manson Family murders that claimed five lives, including that of a very pregnant Sharon Tate, actress […]
by Tomris Laffly on Aug 1, 2019During lunch break on a Western TV series, fading star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) settles into a director’s chair next to his nine-year-old co-star. The young actress is armed with a Walt Disney biography, Dalton a pulpy Western novel. The girl asks Dalton about the story in his book and he recounts the tale of an over-the-hill bronco buster that eerily mirrors his own circumstances. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a loving valentine to an era of studio filmmaking that was coming to an end in 1969, but it’s also a rumination on the inevitability of aging and mortality […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 1, 2019It’s rare for one actor to be cast as the same real-life character in two different productions almost simultaneously. When that real life character is Charles Manson, that makes some news. Australian actor Damon Herriman has taken on this challenging role in both Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood and the second season of David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter. Herriman is perhaps best know for playing Dewey Crowe in the series Justified and currently plays Paul Allen Brown in Perpetual Grace LTD. We talk about the character of Manson, how good writing makes for good acting, and why […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jul 30, 2019Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’s production designer Barbara Ling built the lurid worlds of the most perverted Batman movies: Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, where Uma Thurman (as Poison Ivy) strips out of a pink gorilla suit while golden Tarzans in table cloths swing from vines and lay belly down to form a human path for her to walk on. I’d be lying if I told you D.P Stephen Goldblatt’s close ups of Batman and Robin’s rubber derrieres and armor nipples haven’t been secured into an easily accessible shelf at the top of my memories, which […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jul 30, 2019If you’re reading this story in hopes of gleaning the magic recipe behind Panavision’s increasingly popular “detuning” process, sorry to disappoint you. Panavision Senior Vice President of Optical Engineering Dan Sasaki will divulge no such details. “I wish I could. Unfortunately, that is a process we like to keep secret,” said Sasaki, who began his career at Panavision in 1986 as a lens service technician. “What I can say is that it’s a process that is continually evolving.” Sasaki will, however, happily talk about being a second-generation member of the Panavision family, the storied history of the C Series anamorphics, […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 29, 2019The cover of Filmmaker‘s seventh issue was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, considered here in this original essay by Geoffrey O’Brien that unpacks the film’s genre literature influences. In the lead-up to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, it’s being posted online for the first time. — Editor The two dictionary definitions of “pulp” which Quentin Tarantino posts at the beginning of Pulp Fiction both have a direct bearing on what follows. The first, “a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter,” recalling as it does the phrase “beat to a pulp,” invokes from the outset those catastrophes of the flesh […]
by Geoffrey O'Brien on Jun 8, 2019