The one thing Quentin Tarantino hates about Samuel L Jackson: “I get pissed off”
Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson are one of cinema’s finest pairings: an auteur and actor who best understands his style. They’ve made six films together throughout Tarantino’s three-decade-plus career—a number that gets even more impressive when you consider the man has only directed nine films in total.
Of course, Tarantino has always maintained that Jackson is the best in the business at saying his inimitable dialogue on-screen, and their collaboration has given the star countless incredible monologues to chew on. However, there is one thing that Tarantino hates about Jackson, and it does involve the unique, powerful, and often hilarious words he writes for him.
At the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2024, the 30th anniversary of Pulp Fiction was celebrated, with both Tarantino and Jackson in attendance. That iconic film was their first collaboration, putting Jackson on the map as a major movie star – but the actor acknowledged that he knew from the beginning that starring in a Tarantino movie was a different kettle of fish from working on most films. He revealed that he believes Tarantino films are, first and foremost, character-driven, and this manifests in copious amounts of saying “who you are and how you feel about things, rather than reading five pages of, ‘OK, drive fast, look this way, the car is going over a curb.'”
While many actors may be intimidated by looking at the extensive chunks of dialogue in a Tarantino script, Jackson has the opposite reaction. His lengthy theatre background equipped him with the ability to memorise long stretches of dialogue easily, so he has always found Tarantino’s wordy scripts to be exciting to perform.
Amusingly, he also admitted with a smile, “He knows that I’m used to giving speeches, and I like it.”
Indeed, Tarantino once said that Jackson “knows his dialogue left, right, and centre, upwards and downward.” He also claimed that no one else, bar maybe Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained star Christoph Waltz, gets his dialogue the way Jackson does. Fascinatingly, though, this did lead to a situation in the early years of their working relationship that rubbed Tarantino the wrong way.
During a 2000 interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Tarantino was asked if he planned on casting Jackson in all his films. By this point, Tarantino had cast Jackson in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, so he answered, “Whenever it’s appropriate. But when Sam’s right, he’s so right that no one else could do it. He’s righter than right.” When the interviewer responded, “Kool and the Gang,” though – a reference to a line Jackson delivers in Pulp Fiction – it set Tarantino off on a mini-rant.
During this period, Jackson had become so adept at delivering Tarantino’s quotable dialogue that some audience members began to wonder if he was improvising some of it himself. It was known, in fact, that the “Kool and the Gang” line—said in response to Tarantino himself playing a character named Jimmie who cuts Jackson’s Jules down to size during an argument—was a Jackson adlib. However, according to Tarantino, that was the only improv that made it into the final cut.
“Yeah, but I have to give credit where credit is due,” grumbled Tarantino. “I get pissed off that people think Sam came up with most of his own dialogue because I wrote fuckin’ Sam’s dialogue, all right.”
The aggravated scribe added, “No one really quite sings it like the music it’s supposed to be the way Sam does. My dialogue isn’t poetry, but it’s a second cousin to poetry. It’s funnier than poetry, but it’s a second cousin to poetry. Sam says it like poetry.” However, as much as it pained him, Tarantino had to concede, “‘Kool and the Gang’ is his, all right. That’s something he says.”
Hilariously, Tarantino confessed that Jackson’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the classic R&B band was so catchy that it stuck with him for years. He chuckled, “I found myself fuckin’ saying that fucking thing for two years after making Pulp Fiction. ‘Koool and the Gaaang.’ I don’t even like the group that much, all right!”
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