1994: Quentin Tarantino on his 'intense love' for movies
Director Quentin Tarantino told the BBC that Hollywood executives want to be told what is "good" and what helped him is his cast-iron belief in his own opinion about movies.
Speaking in 1994 during the release of his Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction, Tarantino said: “What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood is this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good, what to like, what not to like."
The director had spent his formative years working in the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach, California. While working shifts there he had watched thousand of movies, building up an impressively encyclopedic knowledge of film.
“The thing about film geeks is they have an intense love for film. An incredible love for film, an incredible ion, they devote a lot of time, they devote a lot of money and they devote a lot of their life to the following of film. But they don’t really have that much to show for all this devotion, other than a movie poster collection or a still collection," said Tarantino.
“The one thing that they do have to definitely show for it, is they have their opinion.”
Tarantino would spend long hours arguing the merits of different films with co-workers and customers like. Despite not having any traditional training in film-making, the director said that this in-depth knowledge and self belief about his cinematic taste helped him when he got the chance to make his own movies.
“Now hear I came, alright I’m a film geek. My opinion is everything, alright. You can all disagree with me, I don’t care alright. I know I’m right as far as I’m concerned and I’ll argue anybody down," he said.
This clip is from Quentln Tarantlno: Hollywood's Boy Wonder, originally broadcast on 25 October 1994.