Quentin Tarantino Reveals The One Thing He Won't Put in Movies

Quentin Tarantino may have just one more movie left before his self-imposed retirement, but he has never been one to use interviews primarily as promotional opportunities anyway. The Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown director had a recent conversation with Variety, in which he broke down why he doesn't abuse animals (even insects) in the movies he makes, in spite of the buckets of blood coming from his human characters. He suggested that part of it is that, since some animals and insects seem plausible to kill, it ruins the immersive nature of the movie, because people would wonder about the differences between real and "movie" deaths.

This comes not long after the filmmaker talked about his aversion to sex scenes in films, saying that they rarely move the narrative forward or serve any real character purpose. That, of course, drew a few jeers from the internet, who pointed out his well-documented history of filming feet in extreme close-up and appealing to his own admitted foot fetish.

"I have a big thing about killing animals in movies. That's a bridge I can't cross," Tarantino told the magazine. "Insects too. Unless I'm paying to see some bizzarro documentary, I'm not paying to see real death. Part of the way that this all works is that it's all just make believe. That's why I can stand the violent scenes, cause we're all just fucking around."

"Some animal, some dog, some llama, some fly, some rat, doesn't give a fuck about your movie," he added. "I'd kill a million rats, but I don't necessarily want to kill one in a movie or see one killed in a movie, because I'm not paying to see real death."

He also said that part of it is his general feeling that a lot of people fall back on tropes like this because they don't have a better idea in terms of storytelling.

"Almost always, it's not just the violence that I have a problem with," he said. "There's usually an incompetence factor in there."

Tarantino recently described his upcoming (and final?) film The Movie Critic, saying that the story is set in California in 1977 and is "based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag." He continued, "He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [from Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic ... Think about Travis's diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his sh-t was really funny. He was as rude as hell."