Why Quentin Tarantino gave up his dream of becoming an actor
For movie fanatics all over the world, Quentin Tarantino bridges the gap between cinephilia and filmmaking by drawing upon the extensive history of the medium and engaging in an innovative form of pastiche. Ranging from Pulp Fiction to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s oeuvre is full of references to the cinematic masterpieces that shaped his creative imagination during the most formative years of his life.
Before he embarked on his incredible journey as an exciting auteur, Tarantino worked as an usher at an adult theatre and expanded his knowledge of film history during his time as an employee at a video store in California. The future filmmaker was particularly interested in acting during those early years, attending classes to develop his craft, but he ended up realising that screenwriting was his true calling while working with other actors.
One assignment during his acting class involved a segment of Marty written by none other than the legendary Paddy Chayefsky, the critically acclaimed 1955 romantic drama. During a conversation with NPR, Tarantino revealed that it was this project that made him entertain the idea of taking writing seriously. By reworking Chayefksy’s brilliant script to suit his own sensibilities, the Pulp Fiction director discovered a hidden talent.
Tarantino recalled what his acting instructor told him: “‘Quentin, you rewrote Paddy Chayefsky.’ I go, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Well, you wrote a whole monologue about a fountain. There’s no fountain in his original screenplay. There’s, you wrote a, you added a monologue to it.’ And I go, ‘Oh, sorry about that.’ He goes, ‘Oh, don’t be sorry. It’s great. It was the best thing in there.’ Now look, I’m sure that monologue was not the best thing in Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay. But my point, but the thing that was interesting is it was the first time somebody had ever complimented me on this thing that I didn’t take seriously.”
The filmmaker added: “At some point in that acting class, I just realised that I need to be a director – for two reasons. One, directors were already my heroes at this point. I wanted to; when I wanted to be an actor I wanted to work with this director. Not work with this actor, I wanted to work for this director. And so as the acting class is going on I just realised I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema, and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realised that I loved movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.”
It completely changed Tarantino’s approach to cinema since all his films have relied heavily on the complex dynamics of his screenwriting. Right from the explosive 1992 neo-noir Reservoir Dogs, it has been clear that Tarantino processes the absurdity and irony of the postmodern condition through the meandering conversations his characters regularly indulge in. While he has also had an acting career by doing cameos in his own projects, it is safe to say that focusing on writing was the right call.
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