Movies - TV
Quentin Tarantino 'Cared Too Much About Movies' To Ever Be
An Actor
By JEREMY SMITH
Before Quentin Tarantino became a trailblazing filmmaker, he harbored dreams of being an actor, and in the 1980s, joined an acting school of note in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. However, in an interview with Deadline, Tarantino revealed that his time at the school reinforced his belief that he was placed on this planet to make movies, not to act in them.
He told Deadline, “I filled my brain with all this [movie and director] stuff, only to find out that the other kids in the acting class, who I liked, I thought they were good kids, but they didn't know s***. Not only did they not know s*** about movies, they cared less. They just cared about themselves. They just cared about being movie stars. That was all they cared about.”
Tarantino didn't want to serve at the mercy of a director and said, “I wanted the movie to be mine.” So when he booked a role on “The Golden Girls” in 1988 as an Elvis Presley impersonator, he cobbled together the money he earned as a performer, and the residuals that came with it, to sustain him through the preproduction of a film he'd written called “Reservoir Dogs.”