Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Quentin Tarantino talks to Martin Scorsese… a long interview that you have to read absolutely
Somewhere in the beginning, QT reveals his current project (aside from preparing for being a dad, probably):
QT: You know, Marty, I’ll tell you an interesting story that I’m going through right now, and I thought it would lead to a very good question about you and movies, so let me go with this.
Right now, I’m working on a book. And I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he’s back home, and it’s like the '50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini…MS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
QT: And so he’s like, “Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff.”
MS: Right.
QT: So he finds himself drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he doesn’t like and some of them he doesn’t understand, but he knows he’s seeing something.
MS: Uh-huh.
QT: So now, I find myself having a wonderful opportunity of, in some cases, rewatching and, in some cases, watching for the first time movies I’ve heard about forever, but from my character’s perspective. So I’m enjoying watching them but I’m also [thinking], ‘How is he taking it? How is he looking at it?’ I always like to have a good excuse for just throwing down into a pit of cinema, so that brings me to ask you: When was it for you that you started being lured away from what you considered Hollywood movies, and started becoming more adventuresome and going outside of your neighborhood to actually see some of the other foreign films that you’d been maybe reading about?