You Want To See Violence?
Quentin Tarantino talks to Brian De Palma | October 20, 2008 | 
16 years after the release ofReservoir Dogs, we tap back into the movie's controversy of the film by revisiting a conversation in which director Quentin Tarantino discusses cinematic violence with Brian De Palma.
The following abridged extract is from a conversation between Quentin Tarantino and Brian De Palma that took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles on August 10 1994. The interview was set up and recorded by documentary filmmaker David Thompson for inclusion in a BBC Omnibus profile of Tarantino that Thompson was directing, commissioned to coincide with the cinema release of Tarantino’s second feature Pulp Fiction. The full interview transcript was duly published in Projections 5(ed. John Boorman & Walter Donohue, Faber and Faber 1996.)
At his first meeting with Tarantino, Thompson had learned of the writer-director’s ardent admiration for Brian De Palma’s work, and so Tarantino responded keenly to the idea of talking movies with De Palma face-to-face for Thompson’s camera. De Palma was equally happy, having seen and admired Reservoir Dogs at an early stage and made Tarantino’s acquaintance thereafter.
The talk between these two controversial filmmakers ranged across many and varied subjects, but inevitably at a particular point it turned to the vexed topic of on-screen violence.
BRIAN DE PALMA: Your scene with the cop in Reservoir Dogs would never have survived a preview [test audience]. They would have said, ‘Ah, are you kidding? Cut it out!’ Don't you think?
QUENTIN TARANTINO: Well, Sundance was the first time a real audience saw the movie, so they were our preview audience in a way. And people were freaking out about the ear scene, yeah.
BDP: I had a particularly difficult fight with the ratings board overScarface, in which I cut the picture back some four times and they still gave me an X, so ultimately I had to appeal in front of the whole board. Now, that’s a really difficult fight, because nobody wants to be on your side. The studios just say, ‘Get an R and leave us alone…’ So after the battles, which had started with Dressed to Kill, I said, ‘OK, you want to see violence? You want to see sex? Then I'll show it to you’, and I went out and madeBody Double. And that ultimately gave me the worst kind of press experience. I remember when the press had seen the movie one of the heads of the studio called me up and said, ‘They’re going to kill you tomorrow!’ Because, as you know, I was also the producer of the movie, so I had to get out there and go on all the shows, and deal with all those violence questions, because this was a way to sell the movie. But the reaction against it was so intense, it really didn’t help much.
QT: I was going through the scrapbook that I used to keep of interviews you did around that time and I’m seeing all the pull-quotes on violence, and the Hitchcock influence. I never thought about it back then, but now it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what I've been going through having to talk about violence, and what I think about it, well, Brian’s been going through this for the last fifteen years.’
BDP: Well, the thing about that, especially on television, is that when we talk about violence, everyone suddenly tunes in. And while we're discussing violence, they’ll show a sequence from one of our most violent pictures, and they’re going to sell a lot of products… They can run all [these violent sequences], it’s cheap to begin with, and of course they say, 'They’re morally reprehensible, we’re embarrassed to have them on air, but please keep watching!' And at the same time, we’re just used as a product. I learned this a long time ago when I was making movies like Greetings and Hi Mom. I’d be out there saying, ‘We’ve got to blow everything up, we’ve got to change everything, the revolution is coming’, and then there’d be an aspirin commercial coming on after me. So you become part of the process, because violence becomes a great product, especially for the media because we make those violent sequences look so good through the camera.
QT: One of the things that you said, which I’ve used in different interviews because it was so right on the money, was that as a film-maker, when you deal with violence, you’re actually penalized for doing a good job.
Michael Madsen dances to Stealers Wheel
in Reservoir Dogs
in Reservoir Dogs
BDP: Absolutely, because you want to make these sequences as effective and moving as possible, and you use all of the things that you’ve learned from other directors and those that you’ve invented yourself. You and I are interested in a form of visual language and story-telling that nobody understands, basically, because they’re blown away by it, and then they say, ‘Well, my God, somebody was being knifed or somebody was being shot. This is horrible and reprehensible, I denounce it and feel bad about enjoying it!’ But, as we’ve said a thousand times, cinema is a visual medium, and we’re interested in terrific visual sequences, and many of them happen to be [whispers] violent.
QT: Well, one of the analogies I’ve always used is that I have no more problem with violence in movies than I do with musical sequences in Vincente Minnelli movies; it’s simply one of the things that you can do in cinema that’s interesting to watch. And I feel totally great and fine in saying that in real life I have a major problem with violence, that I do think our society is too violent, but I have no problem going to a film and seeing violence on the screen.
BDP: I’ve never thought that the argument which is constantly used, that people imitate the violence they see in our movies, makes any sense. Basically, we go to movies to have this violence acted out, we participate in them and maybe cheer them like we do at football games, and that’s it. We don’t pick up a baseball bat and go hit somebody over the head.
QT: You said once before that if you see a movie that’s only a bunch of violent sequences, that’s boring, and it can be why people don’t go to see it.
BDP: Absolutely.
QT: In fact, it’s funny when people ask me, ‘Did you put violence in your movies to make them more commercial?’ Because the violence that I do in fact takes it out of the mainstream and puts it in a kind of specialized area. In our films there’s a tremendous amount of humour. As far as I’m concerned, you’re one of the greatest satirists that we have, and Pauline Kael understood that. But most of the people on the street, they’ll just talk about the two murder sequences that are in your movie, and forget about everything else. I know people who could have seen Reservoir Dogs and would have been fine with it, but when they heard ‘Violence, violence’, they began talking about it as if it was the most violent movie ever made. Now some day I may make the most violent movie ever made, and I wouldn’t mind people saying that then, but Dogswasn’t. The humour was lost in any kind of discussion of the film, and even in the good reviews I got, they all carried a Surgeon General’s-type warning, a little paragraph telling you how violent this movie is, and that you might not be able to take it.
BDP: That happened with Scarface too, in that because of the discussion about violence a lot of people didn’t go to see it in the theatres, they were scared by the chainsaws - you know, ‘Get me out of here!’
The chainsaw scene in De Palma's Scarface
QT: That chainsaw scene is a good comparison, because apart from that, personally I can’t remember a single movie which had something like the ear scene in Dogs that was talked about so much in any review or discussion of the film. By the same token, I’m not crying, because we all know what we’re getting into, it’s the price of doing business.
BDP: But in fact we don’t realize that it’s going to dominate what everybody thinks about the movie.
QT: Exactly.
BDP: And it’s always the first question you get in an interview, and it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, what about all the other stuff?’
QT: I mean, imagine I’m the husband of some young couple, and we’re just sitting there and I say, ‘Well, what do you want to see tonight, honey? You want to seeForrest Gump?’ ‘That’s the movie in which Tom Hanks plays the retarded guy and meets John F. Kennedy?’ ‘OK. Well, what else do you want to see? Clear and Present Danger?’ ‘What's that?’ ‘Well, that’s the new Harrison Ford movie. Or do you want to see Reservoir Dogs?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well that's the movie where the guy gets his ear cut off!’
BDP: ‘Yeah, I want to see a good scene like that!’
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