Hear Quentin Tarantino Talk With Paul Thomas Anderson About 'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood', Which Anderson Has Seen 4 Times
Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson recently sat down and had an almost 35-minute discussion about Tarantino's latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Do I really need to say anything more? The prospect of two filmmaking masters shooting the breeze for over a half-hour is enough to get most movie fans excited. Hear the conversation below.
It certainly has its detractors, but Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the most talked-about movies of the year. Some – like me – love it, while others call it overindulgent – or worse. No matter how you feel about Hollywood, I would hope you would at least admit it's a movie worth talking about. And talking is exactly what Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson did on a recent episode of The Director's Cut podcast.
For his part, Anderson loves the film. During the interview, he tells Tarantino he's seen it multiple times already. "This is the most magnificent film," says Anderson "I have seen it four and half times now [and] one of the things I love about this movie is how much joy there is in it. Just pure joy and your movies always have the joy of making the movie and that they are always filled with that, but there's something else going on here that you haven't had before."
During the course of the convo, Tarantino talks about how Sharon Tate was portrayed in the film. As played by Margot Robbie, Tate's presence has been both hailed and criticized, with some calling her the heart of the film, while others complaining she didn't have enough lines of dialogue. " I tried to not turn Sharon into a Quentin Tarantino character," Tarantino says. "I didn't want Sharon to be a character, I wanted her to be the person that she is. Now it's only my interpretation of the person from what I've learned about it, and I'm definitely leaning into the bright and the light stuff, but that really seems to be who she is. If there are other aspects of her out there I didn't find it...she was a lovely person and [the audience] get[s] a sense of her spirit and they get a sense of her life, and you actually watch her doing things that people do in a life, running errands, driving the car, just life stuff."
The whole conversation is worth listening to, although be warned: there are some spoilers. So if you haven't seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet, you might want to hold off on giving this a listen.
Header photo by Shane Karns via DGA.