The only actor who can match up to Samuel L Jackson, according to Quentin Tarantino
Very few auteurs are as synonymous with their screenwriting as Quentin Tarantino. He burst onto the scene during the 1990s and sent shockwaves across the landscape of cinema, announcing himself as a new maverick voice in indie filmmaking. It was all there to see in his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, and again in Pulp Fiction. His sharp, funny, and motor-mouthed dialogue, laced with a post-modern edge and peppered with pop culture references, stuck to the brain and was regurgitated by audiences.
There’s a precision to his writing, a finely tuned rhythm to the way his characters speak, making it hard not to fall under his spell. Before venturing into directing, Tarantino began his career as a video clerk, cultivating an almost unnerving encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. The films he went on to create are unquestionably tied to film history itself. Whether he’s taking on gun-slinging westerns like The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or delving into the blaxploitation sub-genre with Django Unchained, or penning pastiche war epics like Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino’s films are inherently connected to genre cinema. And so is his dialogue.
It’s no wonder Tarantino has a habit of working with the same actors on multiple pictures, as pulling off his unique writing is no mean feat. One can only imagine him approaching an actor on set and informing them how he imagined each and every intonation and syllable should sound. Tarantino has gone on record to say Samuel L Jackson is one of the best at taking in his dialogue, saying the actor “knows his dialogue left, right, and centre. Upwards and downward.” Tarantino was interviewed by the filmmaker and collaborator Robert Rodriguez on the El Rey Network, and Tarantino shared his thoughts on Jackson.
“There’s a few things with Sam,” Tarantino said. “I mean, we like a lot of the same kind of movies. So it’s not like he doesn’t get it. He comes from theatre. So, he comes from the work ethic of the play is the thing. That’s what we’re doing here.”
Tarantino continued: “But then the thing that makes our relationship is just nobody says my dialogue the way Sam… Sam gets it. He’s a terrific artist. He’s a terrific actor.”
Jackson has worked with Tarantino on six occasions, perhaps most famously when he starred in Pulp Fiction as the suit-wearing hitman who waxes lyrical about cheeseburgers and cries biblical sermons before he assists his targets. But he was also superb in Tarantino’s crime thriller Jackie Brown as the terrifying pony-tailed black-market runner Ordell Robbie.
During the same interview, Tarantino also revealed the only other actor to match Jackson is Christoph Waltz. Tarantino had this to say on Waltz: “Now, Christoph says my dialogue as good as Sam Jackson, but he doesn’t say it the Sam Jackson way,” Tarantino said. “He sings it in a completely different tune.”
Tarantino concluded: “But the way that Christoph and Sam Jackson do it — they turn it into the poetry that it was always supposed to be. They get the music in it. They sing it. They sing the dialogue; they don’t say it. They sing it. It just takes off. It’s alive.”
Waltz worked with Tarantino on 2009’s Inglorious Basterds as the smooth-talking and milk-guzzling Nazi officer, Colonel Hans Landa, and again playing the German dentist and bounty hunter, Dr King Schultz, in Django Unchained – both performances winning the actor Academy Awards. From the very first scene, Waltz delivers a tour de force, dancing between French, German, and English languages while oozing skin-crawling malice. So, it’s no surprise Tarantino holds the actor in such high regard.
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