Films Directed By Quentin Tarantino

"My Pussy Wagon died on me."

"Looked dead, didn't I? Well, I wasn't, but it wasn't for lack of trying I can tell you that. Actually, Bill's last bullet put me in a coma, a coma I was to lie in for four years. When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements referred to as a roaring rampage of revenge. I roared and I rampaged and I got bloody satisfaction. I've killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point. But I have only one more. The last one, the one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill."

"I'm a killer! I'm a murdering bastard, you know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard."

"I suppose the traditional way to conclude this is we cross Hanzo swords. Well, it just so happens this hacienda comes with its very own private beach. And this private beach just so happens to look particularly beautiful bathed in moonlight. And there just so happens to be a full moon out tonight. So, swordfighter, if you want to sword fight, that's where I suggest. But if you wanna be old school about it, and you know I'm all about old school, then we can wait till dawn, and slice each other up at sunrise, like a couple of real-life, honest-to-goodness samurais."

"Is that not the perfect visual image of life and death? A fish flapping on the carpet, and a fish not flapping on the carpet."

"Christopher Walken – Capt. Koons"

"Phil LaMarr – Marvin"

"Quentin Tarantino – Jimmie"

"Maria de Medeiros – Fabienne"

"Harvey Keitel – Winston Wolfe"

"Steve Buscemi – Buddy Holly"

"Rosanna Arquette – Jody"

"Eric Stoltz – Lance"

"Frank Whaley – Brett"

"Bruce Willis – Butch Coolidge"

"Uma Thurman – Mia Wallace"

"Ving Rhames – Marsellus Wallace"

"Amanda Plummer – Honey Bunny (Yolanda)"

"Tim Roth – Pumpkin (Ringo)"

"Samuel L. Jackson – Jules Winnfield"

"John Travolta – Vincent Vega"

"Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead."

"You won't know the facts until you've seen the fiction"

"Girls like me don't make invitations like this to just anyone!"

"[To young Butch] Hello, little man. Boy, I sure heard a bunch about you. See, I was a good friend of your dad's. We were in that Hanoi pit of hell together over five years. Hopefully, you'll never have to experience this yourself, but when two men are in a situation like me and your dad were for as long as we were, you take on certain responsibilities of the other. If it'd been me who'd - not made it, Major Coolidge would be talking right now to my son Jim. The way it turned out, I'm talking to you. Butch. I got somethin' for ya. [Sits down, holds up a gold wristwatch with no band] This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the First World War. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee. Made by the first company to ever make wristwatches. Up 'til then, people just carried pocket watches. It was bought by Private Doughboy Erine Coolidge on the day he set sail for Paris. This was your great-grandfather's war watch and he wore it every day he was in that war, and when he'd done his duty, went home to your great-grandmother, took the watch off, put it in an old coffee can, and in that can it stayed until your granddad, Dane Coolidge, was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Germans once again. This time they called it World War II."

"[Driving back to his apartment to retrieve his father’s gold watch] Shit! Of all the fucking things she could fucking forget, she forgets my father’s watch! I specifically reminded her; bedside table. On the kangaroo. I said the words “don’t forget my father’s watch”."

"[Putting out a hit on Butch] I'm prepared to scour the earth for that motherfucker. If Butch goes to Indochina, I want a nigga hiding in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass."

"[to Butch] This business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar...it does. If you mean it gets better with age... it don't."

"[to Butch] The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps. You fight through that shit."

"Just because I have no wish to murder you before the eyes of your daughter does not mean parading her around in front of me is going to inspire sympathy. You and I have unfinished business. And not a goddamn fucking thing you've done in the subsequent four years, including getting knocked up, is going to change that."

"Vivica A. Fox – Vernita Green/Copperhead"

"Daryl Hannah – Elle Driver/California Mountain Snake"

"Chiaki Kuriyama – Gogo Yubari"

"Sonny Chiba – Hattori Hanzo"

"Lucy Liu – O-Ren Ishii/Cottonmouth"

"Uma Thurman – The Bride/Black Mamba"

"David Carradine – Bill/Snake Charmer"

"For Tarantino, who set aside his skill at dialogue to show he can do pure action, the film is a challenge to his ego. Ads trumpet Kill Bill as “the Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino.” Talk about hubris. Fellini didn't even start counting till 8 1/2. But moxie is part of Tarantino's DNA. Who else would make his first film in six years a wet kiss to kung fu and pack it with his fetishes for ultraviolence, Uma Thurman's feet and music from Nancy Sinatra to RZA? And who else could pull it off? Kill Bill is damn near as good as Tarantino thinks it is."

"Like a dick-swinging flasher, Quentin Tarantino lets all his obsessions hang out in Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Some people may want to kill him for it, and not just because they'll have to pay again to see Vol. 2, set for release on February 20. Kill Bill is an act of indecent exposure. Everything that makes Tarantino tumescent — kung-fu fighting, samurai flicks, spaghetti westerns and babe-on-babe head bashing, preferably with swords — is stuffed into the 110 minutes of Vol. 1. No use hammering Tarantino for raiding the lost ark of 1970s pop culture when his movie is killingly funny, wildly inventive, bloody as a gushing artery and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Tarantino has the talent to show us what's sacred about the profane, even if you didn't enjoy a misspent youth in seedy theaters with floors sticky from God knows what. In Kill Bill, Tarantino brings delicious sin back to movies — the thrill you get from something down, dirty and dangerous."

"I don't like realistic violence. In fact, I don't really like violence full stop. The violence is Quentin's thing. I don't groove with him on it. But I think the way he executes his violence is comic, creative, dramatic and playful, and not titillating in that horrifically realistic way. It's clearly a creative expression. If you look at the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill Volume 1, the reason he wanted it to be so operatic and absurdist was because, if it had been less ridiculous, it would be more upsetting."

"Q: Kill Bill is an eclectic movie, stitched together from samurai movies, Yakuza movies, spaghetti westerns..."

"The sordid creepiness that occasionally seeps into Kill Bill makes you wonder what Mr. Tarantino is trying to do, and whether he is entirely in control of his own imagination."

"While being so relentlessly exposed to a filmmaker's idiosyncratic turn-ons can be tedious and off-putting, the undeniable passion that drives Kill Bill is fascinating, even, strange to say it, endearing. Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity. Old movies are not the sole focus of his obsession. The most vivid emotional connection in Kill Bill does not take place between any of the characters, but between the director and his star, Uma Thurman. Mr. Tarantino has referred to Ms. Thurman as my actress, and as Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg. Accordingly, much of the perverse energy of Kill Bill arises from his near-maniacal fascination with her. She is at once his idol, his alter-ego, his dream lover and his muse, the way Anna Karina was for Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960's."

"In parts of Pulp Fiction (1994) and in his last picture, Jackie Brown (1997), Mr. Tarantino seemed to be using the action-exploitation formulas of which he is so enamored as stepping stones toward an exploration of plausible characters and authentic emotions. Now, it seems, his interests have swung in the opposite direction, and he has immersed himself, his characters and his audience in a highly artificial world, a looking-glass universe that reflects nothing beyond his own cinematic obsessions."

"WITH its relentless bloodshed and scrambled, inconclusive narrative, Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited fourth feature, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, is certain to provoke both awe and revulsion. The film's detractors and its fans are likely to agree, however, that the movie, a densely referential pastiche of B-movie attitudes and situations, is above all an exercise in style."

"The violence is ridiculous, in the literal sense of the word: When a baddie (there are no goodies) is decapitated, the neck-stump sprays blood like an infernal lawn sprinkler. These abattoir antics might amuse in limited doses (though John Cleese's Black Knight proved 30 years ago that the joke is not in the mutilation but in the obliviousness to it). Yet transgressing limits is Tarantino's whole point, and so we get stabbing after stabbing, severed limb after severed limb, arterial spray after arterial spray, until the walls are painted red and the floor piled high with body parts. And though the carnage is composed by famed martial-arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, it lacks both the athletic poetry he brought to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the dizzying spatial geometry he presented in The Matrix. Rather, with the exception of a single sequence featuring a ball-and-chain, the fight in the restaurant (which runs to more than 20 minutes) feels like what it is: a long, mostly earthbound slog through bone and sinew. By the end, it's not funny, or beautiful, or even shocking. It's merely tiresome, an hour spent at the Safeway meat counter."

"In an interview following the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Tim Roth ventured that "I honestly think you could take the same script but reshoot it with women and it would work. It would be the most controversial film ever. ... You could call it Reservoir Bitches." It took more than a decade, but with Kill Bill Volume 1 (out on video this week), Quentin Tarantino finally made his Reservoir Bitches. And while it's not the most controversial film ever (nor even of the past twelve months), that was clearly the director's aspiration. Originally conceived as a single film but split into two "volumes" due to its length (Volume 2 opens in theaters on Friday), Kill Bill is, by most accounts, the most violent film ever released by a major studio. If that weren't enough to ensure its notoriety, the vast majority of that violence is performed by officially hot actresses Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, and Vivica A. Fox."

"It's a really important moment... I didn't think it was gory, because it wasn't a lot of blood, it was just the head was gone, at the end. I just feel like it represents how important it was for her to go to Japan and get that sword made by Sonny Chiba's character, Hattori Hanzo. Hattori Hanzo's sword is in itself its own individual character in the movie. And to have that payoff in the end, with how strong it was, it could just slice her head off like that, through a skull, which is very difficult to do. It really takes, it comes all the way back around for why she went to get that sword and why it was important, and how for her character, she had always wanted one of those swords. To die by that sword is really the only way that she could have died with respect. I think the Bride knew that. So they sort of allow each other the respect that they deserved... You'd have to think that if you do something that's not such a great thing, even though she was taking orders from Bill, that it's going to come back at you, and you have to take responsibility for that moment. I think that she probably knew at some point that that was going to happen."

"I actually didn't think she was tough. I didn't, I thought she was a really cool character to play because she was a survivor, you know what I mean? She had so many reasons why she had become what she was. She had to continue fighting all her life to basically stay alive, from the moment that her parents were killed. He (Tarantino) pretty much lays it out for you... O-Ren Ishii wasn't the type of person who was ever gonna die peacefully in her bed, you know what I mean? She was going to die fighting and that was how it was gonna be. She died the best way that she could have ever imagined, with the Hattori Hanzo sword. So ultimately, it was a very respectful death, and I think her character is more of a survivor than someone who's tough, you know?"

"Compared to Q.T.'s slice 'em, dice 'em deli, the much-hyped Neo versus 100 Agent Smiths showdown appears unforgivably gutless and soulless. Moral guardians may be outraged but, after a build that most audiences will find slow, it is the bloody geysers Tarantino uncorks here that will have them joining the queue for the very next showing."