#1675 - Quentin Tarantino

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Thanks for doing this, man, I really appreciate it.

Quentin Tarantino (0:15)

Oh, my pleasure, mate.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I've been a gigantic fan forever, so I'm like a little kid in a candy store today.

Quentin Tarantino (0:20)

Oh, I'm glad, man. We met each other at the comedy store, I think, maybe once or twice, actually.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Yeah, at least once, for sure.

Dude, you had a wild ride. I mean, it's almost, your movie career is almost 30 years old now.

Quentin Tarantino (0:31)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

Isn't that crazy?

Quentin Tarantino (0:33)

Yeah, it's actually wild to think I've been doing it this long and still playing the game at this level. It's pretty cool.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Well, yeah. Well, it's been such a unique ride for you, too, right? Like, you wrote, let me get this straight, you wrote True Romance, you sold it, and you used the money from True Romance to fund Reservoir Dogs.

Quentin Tarantino (0:54)

Well, that was gonna be the idea. The idea was...

Joe Rogan (0:57)

Pull this microphone up to your face.

Quentin Tarantino (0:59)

There we go.

Joe Rogan (1:00)

You can move it around, so you don't have to lean into it.

Quentin Tarantino (1:02)

Cool. That was gonna be the idea, was, I was selling True Romance, I was gonna get like $30,000. And I'd never had $30,000 in my life. I was, it was a minimum-wage kit. I was only like making like $150 a week, you know?

And...

Joe Rogan (1:22)

At a video store.

Quentin Tarantino (1:24)

At a video store, a video archives in Manhattan Beach. And so the thing about it was, so that was the kind of plan, well, I finally got some money, then I'll shoot on 16 millimeter, this thing that I can shoot in like a, in a muffler shop or something, which was Reservoir Dogs.

Then I showed it to the guy who ended up becoming my partner on the film, Lauren Spender. And he read it, and he was like, Quentin, this is a pretty good script. I mean, we could actually get real money and make a real movie. And I was like, no, man, I've been hearing that for years. No one's gonna give me money to make a movie. I've never done shit. You know, it's just not gonna work out. It's just not gonna work out. I don't buy it. Now that I've actually got some money in my hand, I'm gonna do it this way, and take it on the film festival circuit. And then he was like, okay, let's hear what, how about this?

Give me three months. Just give me three months. If at the end of three months, I can't get some interest to make it like a real movie, then okay, then I'll help you, and we'll make the little home movie version. And so, you know, so I gave him, he paid me $100, I gave him an option for three months.

And in three months, we've got actually somebody who was into, not the person who ended up doing it, but we got somebody who was interested in doing it, that would have like given us like 600,000. And then we ended up making a deal with live entertainment, which was sort of the home video home of Coralco, the big Rambo studio. And they gave us like $1.3 million to make the movie.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

When you sit back and you talk about that today, does it even seem real? I mean, that you really were working in that video store and that you really did write that? I mean, it's gotta be a bizarre whirlwind adventure that your life has been.

Quentin Tarantino (3:08)

Well, it was like, well, in a way, the working at the video store was the part that was real. You know, everything else was like, that was the fairy tale.

I kept waiting for it all to kind of fall apart. At some point, this movie that's gonna happen is going to fall apart. Either it's like it all falls through or the company changes their mind or I get fired while I'm doing it and that's the end of that.

And I had had friends who had gotten some places and then things went bad. So I kept waiting for things to go bad, but then they didn't. And then I had like at a certain point, I realized, well, they're not gonna fire me because the actors really love me. The actors wouldn't allow them to fire me. The actors would walk. So I go, I guess I'm pretty safe as far as that's concerned. But it was more like a situation where up until 91, up until I did Reservoir Dogs, any luck that I had was either no luck or bad luck. Everything was always just a big buildup to a horrible letdown.