Renowned American film director Quentin Tarantino has come to Moscow to present his new movie — Once upon a time... in Hollywood. The movie will hit the silver screens in Russia on August 8.
— "Inglorious Basterds" starts with "Once upon a time in France", then you wanted to make a movie about somethings that happened once upon a time in Holywood. In your recent movies you play out major historic events in your own way, like some kind of a revenge against history. Is this your way of making things right somehow?
— Well, it has kind of turned into that to some degree or another, but it wasn't a masterplan on my part. I guess it wasn't this [movie — TASS], I knew I was gonna do this with this one [the new movie — TASS]. But I didn't nkow that with Inglorious Basterds. I just kind of wrote myself into a corner and had to find my way out. And killing Hitler was a way out of the corner. It was kind of interesting, but then it was kind of neat though — when I did that, I kind of created a genre of my own and I felt free to explore than genre. And I feel I kind of did that with Basterds and I think I did that to some degree with Django Unchained... And so to me this is sort of my histotical trilogy.
— You've already said that a lot — about the movies inside a movie. I had an impression that you had even more fun making them than the actual movie. What did you have to get rid of while editing and which one was your favourite?
— Well, I had a lot of fun doing it. It's like I can make a movie, but you know it's not in the cards for me to necessarily make a whole 50s western TV show. So the fact that I was actually able to do that with the Bounty Law sequence was really a lot of fun. For the Bounty Law sequence, that was probably one of the things I had most fun with and one of the things I was most proud of, because when I looked at it, it looked just like a 50s show, like Wanted: Dead or Alive or Have Gun — Will Travel or Rifle Man or something like that. So, we only have a little bit of it in the movie, but I actually shot like the whole opening of that show, a bumper teaser that started the show. I can't wait when it comes out on DVD: we'll have like the entire Bounty Law sequence at the beginning with Michael Madsen as a DVD exta. I have so much cool stuff to use — we had a couple more Lancer sceens that had more of the Lancer brothers, with Luke Perry and Timothy Olyphant. I can't wait to show more of that.
— Was that flamethrower that DiCaprio used in the movie real?
— Well, it's a movie prop version of a flamethrower as opposed to something somedody would have in Vietnam. But he had to work it, alright? It shot fire and it was hot like he said it was. And he had to aim at at stunt person and set them on fire. He actually found it disturbing to do that so when we did the 14 Fists of McCluskey sequence after shooting that for a while DiCaprio was kind of freaked out by burning 8 people to death.
— "In Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" one can view Rick and Cliff as a symbol of old Hollywood and hippies as the new generation, the new Hollywood that took over the industry. So in your opinion is the new film about the old clasing with the new in 1969?
— It is definitely a kind of a clash of cultures. And by the way, there are some people saying "wow, I didn't know Quentin didn't like hippies so much" or "I didn't know Quentin was such an enemy of the counterculture". I'm not an enemy of the counterculture! That's exactly the counterculture I'd like to be in, but that's not necessarily the counterculture Rick's coming from. And that's my job to write Rick's character, from Rick's prospective, not mine. He's not a stand-in for me, he's who he is. But I did like the idea of dealing with the rise of the 60s counterculture in Hollywood, and how it changed everything. But I thought it was interesting... I think anybody else doing that story would make it about that. I actually like the idea that I'm following characters who are outside of that counterculture, who almost feel they are being steamrolled by it, and they're on the outside looking in. I think that was an interesting way to tell the story.