The three writers who inspired Quentin Tarantino’s signature style of dialogue
There’s nobody in Hollywood who writes dialogue quite like Quentin Tarantino, but it wasn’t like a lightbulb suddenly went off in his head when he was working as a video store clerk, and he stumbled upon the perfect way to script characters to an era-defining degree.
As mentioned, nobody writes like Tarantino does, but there are plenty who tried. In the aftermath of Pulp Fiction, especially, independent American cinema became saturated with rapid-fire exchanges laden with pop culture references, and it was obvious who was the inadvertent instigator.
It sounds obvious in hindsight, looking at how deceptively simple it is on paper, but having fictional characters engage in conversations with real people would have turned out to be a transformative moment for many aspiring screenwriters. Movie characters often tend to talk like movie characters, but Tarantino helped popularise shooting the shit and turn it into an art form.
That naturalistic ear for dialogue has been a key part of his arsenal since the very beginning, and it even came in handy for other movies when Tarantino was drafted in to work as an uncredited polisher on a number of high-profile blockbusters, but it all had to come from somewhere.
There were three he named as being integral to creating his own unique way of verbalising his protagonists and antagonists alike, and breaking them down into their individual components, it makes perfect sense despite the trio hailing from different backgrounds and becoming popular through very different means.
“When it comes to my dialogue, the three writers that affected it the most – as far as like a genuine influence – would probably be a combination of Elmore Leonard, David Mamet, and Richard Pryor,” he explained to Sirius XM. That wasn’t how he figured out how to write it, though, with his days as a jobbing actor coming in handier than he could have ever expected.
“I actually discovered writing dialogue, I used to be an actor and was in acting classes,” he said. “And so, part of your thinking in acting classes is to drum up scenes to do, and I always wanted to do scenes from movies and stuff. And then I didn’t have access to any scripts or anything like that, so I would watch a movie, and then I can remember.”
Instead of reciting it verbatim, Tarantino would add his own flourishes to the words he could recall, which served as the genesis of his signature style. Leonard’s pulpy crime and mystery novels have always been key for the two-time Academy Award winner, with his tightly crafted narrative labyrinths imprinting many more of his movies than just Rum Punch adaptation Jackie Brown.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Mamet rose to fame for his dialogue-driven character pieces that carried an effortless air of realism and free-flowing cadence that’s easily identifiable within Tarantino’s own screenplays, even if he would merge them with his love of cinema’s deeper cuts and his own pop culture savviness to make it uniquely his own.
Pryor, meanwhile, became one of the greatest stand-up comedians in history by weaving his story-driven style with insightful social commentary and no shortage of foul language, with Tarantino’s regularly freewheeling approach to narrative and his fondness for swearing partially born from Pryor’s transformative work on the stage.
Individually, there isn’t much to unite Leonard, Mamet, and Pryor directly, but put them together, and Tarantino’s celebrated screenwriting career has become the end result.
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