‘The way I write…’—Tarantino

“The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way. I had heard that whole speech about the Sicilians a long time ago, from a black guy living in my house. One day I was talking with a friend who was Sicilian and I just started telling that speech. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that.’ In True Romance the one thing I knew Cliff had to do was insult the guy enough that he’d kill him, because if he got tortured he’d end up telling him where Clarence was, and he didn’t want to do that. I knew how the scene had to end, but I don’t write dialogue in a strategic way. I didn’t really go about crafting the scene, I just put them in the room together. I knew Cliff was going to end up doing the Sicilian thing, but I didn’t know what Coccotti was going to say. They just started talking and I jotted it down. I almost feel like a fraud for taking credit for writing dialogue, because it’s the characters that are doing it. To me it’s very connected to actors’ improv with me playing all the characters. One of the reasons I like to write with pen and paper is it helps that process, for me anyway.”
Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino
Creative Screenwriting interview with Erik Bauer

Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino sat down with writer/director Robert Rodriguez on The Director’s Chair and talked about the creative process. Tarantino grew-up with a fascination for movies in the way some kids have playing sports. It was an obsession. After dropping out of high school, he stumbled upon writing while taking an acting class when he was 19 or 20 years old. (Keep in mind that this was the early ’80s before everyone had cable Tv, VHS machines, or the Internet. And when Tarantino’s income was sub-$10,000 per year, so he wasn’t buying plays and scripts. He used his lack of resources—and lack of going to film school— to his advantage.)

“I always had a good memory, so I would see a scene from a movie and I would just remember it. And I’d go home and write it from memory. And anything else I couldn’t remember or anything good I came up with in the meantime, I’d add it into the scene—because it was just my scene. And little, by little, by little I started adding more, and more, and more to the scenes. And that was me learning how to write dialogue—or just realizing I could write dialogue. And I never took it seriously until a member of the class, a guy named Ronnie Coleman, [said], ‘Quentin, you’re really good. You’re as good as Paddy Chayefsky.’ ‘What do you mean I’m as good as Paddy Chayefsky?’ ‘Well, we did that scene in class from Marty and you just wrote it down—you gave me this handwritten scene from Marty. And it included this entire monologue about a fountain. Well, I actually have the original Paddy Chayefsky script and there’s no monologue about a fountain. That was completely added by you. You added an entire monologue to it. And it was just as good as the Paddy Chayefsky stuff.’ And somebody saying something like that to you actually got me to taking in seriously. That maybe I did have a talent for that.”
Quentin Tarantino

It’s important to also realize that means he was writing for at least a decade before he sold his first script—True Romance.

P.S. And because I like quirky little connections, one of the teachers Tarantino studied with was James Best. Back in the late 80s James and his wife Dorothy opened The James Best Theater in Longwood, Florida (an Orlando suburb) in hopes of getting on the ground floor of training actors for what was marketed as “Hollywood East.” James said in an 1988 Orlando Sentinel article, ”This will be the new Hollywood. We want to train Floridians so they can get jobs.” Things didn’t turn out that way, but I did move from L.A. back to my hometown of Orlando in ’88 and my wife actually had the lead roll in Goldilocks and the Three Bears performed at The James Best Theater. Gotta love those odd connections. (If there’s a Hollywood East today, it’s in Atlanta where over 40 movies and TV shows were being shot in Georgia last month.)

Related posts:
Analytical vs. Intuitive Writing “To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process.”—Tarantino
How to Write a Screenplay in One Day Basically Tarantino used a variation of this method in writing his acting scenes.
Tarantino & Truth
The Django—Silver Linings Connection
Screenwriting Quote #134 (Chayefsky)
Tarantino on Leonard

Scott W. Smith