Earlier this year, we discovered that Quentin Tarantino was coming for our jobs and publishing reviews of classic movies on the New Beverly Cinema website – an establishment the acclaimed filmmaker owns. Now, the director of Reservoir Dogs has encroached even more on our patch, posting an interview he conducted with John Milius, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter best known for penning Apocalypse Now and directing both Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.
Tarantino was apparently taken duck hunting by Milius and fellow cinema icons Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis in '95. "John and I sat in a duck blind all day, sipping whiskey out of a flask, talking about movies and shooting the tail feathers off of ducks," he writes. "This is only part of it. Later I’ll transcribe more."
You can read the entire interview here. Highlights include their discussion on why John Houston should not have directed the Milius' penned The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean ("The movie now is kinda’ a poor man’s Butch Cassidy"), and how Milius' produced Paul Schrader's Hardcore ("a wonderful script that turned out to be a lousy movie").
Tarantino also adds a few fun annotations. When Milius says at one point, "If people are loyal to each other that’s very meaningful," Tarantino notes that he used the line at a later date in Pulp Fiction – when John Travolta's Vincent Vega talks to himself in the mirror after leaving his date with Mia, played by Uma Thurman. The whole interview, though, is a fun – if slightly self-congratulatory – conversation that fans will no doubt enjoy.
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