Grindhouse (film)

"Doctor Block: Self preservation comes to mind."

"Doctor Block: I'm gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge."

"Quentin Tarantino/Rapist: I ain't never seen a one-legged stripper. I've seen a stripper with one breast. I've seen one with twelve toes. But I ain't never seen one with one leg...and I've been to Morocco."

"Question: Can I ask the leg question to get it out of the way?"

"Rose McGowan: The best description I’ve heard of it, I was talking to somebody, and he said, “I have never laughed and dry heaved in the same moment.” And I thought if that could explain the movie in any way, that would be…I think that should be on the…I’m going to talk to Harvey, that really should be on the poster."

"Freddy Rodriguez: It was funny because the first couple days we were shooting… the first couple days you're always still trying to find what you're doing. And Quentin stood up one day and said 'dude, you're like Snake Pliskin! The character's like Snake Plissken!' And we all kind of raised an eye brow and we said, 'really?' Cause he is kind of like Snake Plissken. And so from then on, we just kind of stuck with that. Because the whole film had an old school John Carpenter feel anyway, so we said 'yea yea, he should be like Snake Plissken, ha ha ha.'"

"Incensed at what I heard, I told Rose that she was not blacklisted from MY movies and that Harvey couldn't tell me who to cast. The reason was that Harvey didn't work on my movies, I made movies all those years for Dimension and Bob Weinstein. So I explained that if I cast her in my next film, Harvey couldn't suddenly tell me no, because my first question would be "Oh, really? Why can't I cast her?" And I was sure he would not want to tell me why."

"Robert Rodriguez: I’d gotten this idea, just before Sin City, to do two short features, like, 60 minutes in length, as a double feature, which I was gonna direct myself. I said to Quentin: "You should direct one, I’ll direct the other," and he said: "Oh, let’s call it Grindhouse and make them like those old movies from the '70s and early '80s. But if we do it, we could do Kung Fu or action, but I think horror would be the best way to go." So I thought: "Well, hey, the best thing I’ve got is this zombie movie script, if you wanna just get started right away you can finish writing it, I never finished it." And Quentin goes: "Oh, I love zombie movies - yeah, yeah, send it to me, I’ll read it." But before I could even give it to him, the next day he already had Death Proof in mind. So I went back to the zombie script, and as I wrote it, I started really getting back into it."

"As the outbreak's survivors - including Michael Biehn's gruff cop and Marley Shelton's runaway lesbian doc - band together to fight the toxic zombie hordes, Rodriguez barely stops for breath. Gone is the talky slow-burn of Tarantino's Death Proof; this is utterly, insanely relentless. It probably winks at the audience too often to be mistaken for a real grindhouse effort (Bruce Willis as a slimy mutant monster? C'mon). Still, it (dis)gracefully pays homage to a time when horror movies were shabby, disreputable and much more fun than today's vanilla outings. It's just ironic that Rodriguez has spent millions recreating what exploitation filmmakers like Lucio Fulci and John Hayes used to knock out for peanuts. There's a lesson in there somewhere..."

"In one of the memoir’s most gripping chapters, she recounts her affair with director Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids,” “From Dusk till Dawn”), a smooth-talking, sensitive-seeming guy who turned out to be a Svengali. He and Quentin Tarantino were planning a double feature—”Planet Terror” and “Death Proof”—based on pulp movies of the 1970s, and he wanted McGowan to star. McGowan fell hard and fast, trusting Rodriguez enough to tell him about her experience with Weinstein. He proceeded to use the knowledge against her, she claims, as a tool for mind games, starting with a scene in which Tarantino, playing a character in his movie, attacks McGowan’s character. “I was in a backward world,” she writes. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” In what McGowan interpreted as the ultimate act of cruelty, Rodriguez “sold our film to my monster.”"

"Well, ain't you so sweet that you make sugar taste just like salt!"

"Get ready to fly, bitch!"

"[after Arlene turns him down for a lapdance] Well, that's alright. You're still a nice girl, and I still like you. But you know how people say [in a John Wayne drawl] "you're okay in my book" or "in my book that's no good"? Well, I actually have a book. And everybody I ever met goes in this book, and now I've met you, and you're going in the book too. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to file you under chicken...shit."

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. Do you hear me, Butterfly? Miles to go before you sleep."

"Hey! Ladies! That was fun. [laughs] Well... Adios!"

"Q: How much of the time were you actually in the vehicle being chased around and was it as fast as it looks?"

"[Tarantino] had an idea and a complete vision for it right away when he first talked about it. He started to tell me the story and said, 'It's got this death-proof car in it.' I said, 'You have to call it Death Proof.' I helped title the movie, but that's it."

"Q: So how did you decide which way to take it?"

"Q: When did you realise that two groups of girls were going to be the focus of Death Proof?"

"Quentin Tarantino: There’s a wonderful aspect that Kurt has that’s fantastic, and it mirrors Stuntman Mike a lot. He’s a working professional and he’s been in this business for a long time. He’s done all this episodic television – he did all those TV series, The High Chaparrals and the Harry O‘s. And he’s worked with f****g everybody. Literally. So he knows the life that Stuntman Mike’s had. He’s even the same generational age and he knows some of the jumping-off points. Cameron Mitchell would have made a really good Stuntman Mike. So would William Smith, or Ralph Meeker back in his day. Kurt knew all those guys, he worked with them when he was a little kid. But also what’s interesting is that he’s known Stuntman Mikes, and there’s one guy in particular he’s basing it on. And it’s nothing to do with wardrobe or tics. The stunt guys too, they’ve all known guys like Stuntman Mike: he never really actually did a whole lot, but just enough to have a career. To make Stuntman Mike real for me, I worked out his entire career. I actually worked out more about his background than I could ever show in the movie."

"Q: Were you daunted by attempting a car chase?"

"CGI for car stunts doesn't make any sense to me—how is that supposed to be impressive? [...] I don't think there have been any good car chases since I started making films in '92—to me, the last terrific car chase was in Terminator 2. And Final Destination 2 had a magnificent car action piece. In between that, not a lot. Every time a stunt happens, there's twelve cameras and they use every angle for Avid editing, but I don't feel it in my stomach. It's just action. ~ Quentin Tarantino]]"

"Kim is unapologetic about her gun, and Tarantino rewards her and her friends by ending the movie after they’ve killed Stuntman Mike, instead of portraying the consequences of their crime. But other films of the 1960s and ’70s — the B-movies that Death Proof riffs on — are not so eager to justify their female characters’ violent impulses. In The Warriors (1979), the title gang meets an all-female mob called the Lizzies who invite their male counterparts to hang at their apartment. This seduction turns out to be a ruse, and the Lizzies attempt to kill the Warriors. Of course, the women are all lousy shots, so the Warriors get away, but not before the softest and youngest among them is injured. Director Walter Hill doesn’t include one frame of a woman getting in a punch, but there are plenty of shots of the Warriors nimbly defeating their weaker foils. Tarantino allows his female characters to land more than a few blows. You could argue that he does something similar to what Steiner accuses Andrea Dworkin of doing in her 1990 novel, Mercy. That novel tells the story of Andrea, a woman who endures constant physical and sexual violence over her lifetime and eventually attempts to mitigate her agony by killing men. In her critique of the novel in The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner points to an unresolved contradiction: The violence that men perpetuate turns out to be the only way to alleviate the protagonist’s pain. So Andrea kills men, a twist of events that Steiner calls “intolerant, simplistic, and often just as brutal as what it protests.” Are the women of Death Proof just as brutal as what they protest? Is Tarantino’s fantasy an imagined corrective to gender-based violence, or just another form of it? Feminist critic Ellen Willis, who died in 2006, might have favored the latter interpretation. In a 1977 Village Voice article, “Beginning to See the Light,” Willis writes about her ambivalence toward punk rocker Patti Smith: “I’m also uncomfortable with her androgynous, one-of-the-guys image; its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny…that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.” Her description of Smith could certainly apply to the women of Death Proof: Stuntwomen Zoë and Kim are self-proclaimed “gearheads,” berating the other girls for preferring John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink to classic car-chase movies like Vanishing Point."

"If Death Proof is Tarantino’s fantasy of what women talk about when they get together, it’s a pretty great one. Those “long, long, long” conversations take on a loping, aimless rhythm that mirrors the pulse of the film itself. Perhaps they make Bradshaw uneasy in part because these lengthy girl-on-girl chats are not something we see too often in movies. It feels like watching an actual group of women talk about their lives: How far they’re willing to take things with the men they’re dating, their plans for the evening, how they’re going to score pot. (Not through any men: “We don’t score ourselves, we’re gonna be stuck with them all fucking night.”) With the exception of Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson, Tarantino cast relatively underexposed actresses to play the lead women. It’s hard to place them in the context of other films, which makes their intrepid characters feel both true to life and super-human. They’re tough, quick-witted women who are simultaneously powerful, unapologetic, sexy, fun, angry, and reckless. They do whatever they feel like doing. And they look so cool doing it. The stuntwomen characters in Death Proof aren’t just stand-ins for actresses on a film shoot; they’re surrogates for the female viewer who perform feats of strength and tenacity that ordinary women can only daydream of. This is why it’s so upsetting that people mistook the film for a fetishistic, misogynist screed. That it was mostly women who protested the film is particularly disappointing. After all, art, as Steiner argues, can do things reality can’t. A decade after its release, Death Proof demonstrates that when it comes to gender violence, 2007, or even 2017, can still feel a lot like the 1970s — and in its cartoonish depiction of evil men, it gives those ordinary women license to get angry about the everlasting problem of brutality against women. Watching Death Proof, or any revenge fantasy, is a powerful act of vengeance-by-proxy — one in which everyone gets to keep their limbs."

"And Nicolas Cage...as...Fu Manchu!"

"Fu Manchu: THIS... is my Mecca! [bursts into sinister laughter]"

"If you're gonna hire Machete to kill the bad guy, you better make damn sure the bad guy isn't YOU!"

"He knows the score. He gets the women. And he kills the bad guys."

"They just fucked with the wrong Mexican."

"If you... were thinking... of going... into... this house... DON'T!"

"If you... were thinking... of opening... that door... DON'T!"

"If you... were thinking... of checking out... the basement... DON'T!"

"If you are thinking of seeing this film alone, DON'T! [in a monotonous voice] Don't."

"HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN! He's pissed! And he wants answers!"

"He's cashing in his nickels and dimes for a new way of life."

"This Thanksgiving... prepare... to have the stuffing scared out of you."

"White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved."

"This Thanksgiving... you'll be coming home for the holidays... in a body bag."

"Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" and Robert Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" play as if "Night of the Living Dead" (1967) and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" were combined on a double bill under the parentage of the dark sperm of vengeance."

"My own field of expertise in this genre is the cinema of Russ Meyer, and I was happy to see QT's closing homage to the tough girls and the beaten stud in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (1965), which John Waters has named as the greatest film of all time. One heroine even copies Tura Satana's leather gloves, boots and ponytail. I may have spotted, indeed, the most obscure quotation from Meyer. In an opening montage of his "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970), there is a brief, inexplicable shot of a boot crushing an egg. Rodriguez uses the same composition to show a boot crushing a testicle. So the Cinema marches on."

"Q: So is the point of Grindhouse for the two of you to make the best ”crappy” movie you can?"

"Tarantino: You’re bringing all the judgment there. That’s your adjective. I never use the term crap. Ever! These are not so-bad-they’re-good movies. I love this stuff! And that’s what we want to re-create. For lack of a better word, we want Grindhouse to be a ride. I think we could both go out with our movies and have them stand on their own. But what’s so good about this is it’s two movies, and trailers, and bad prints, and if a little bit of gang violence breaks out in the theater, all the better! It just makes the whole experience more interactive!"

"Wired: How did you and Tarantino dream up Grindhouse?"