Quentin Tarantino on “the complete utter payoff of perseverance.”

This is an excerpt from an article in the Telegraph.co.uk by Benjamin Secher Here's the link to the full original article.

"Tarantino’s success as a film-maker did not come easily. “Before Reservoir Dogs, everything was constantly a big build up to a huge let down,” he says. “[Venerated US film critic] Pauline Kael used to say that Hollywood is the only town where people 'can die of encouragement’ and that kind of was my situation.” Tarantino quit school – “the worst institution ever imposed on me” – at 16 and took a job as an usher at “a full-on triple-X porno cinema” called the Pussycat Theatre. He then spent most of his twenties working for the minimum wage at a video rental shop in Manhattan Beach, California, watching obscure films, writing speculative screenplays and figuring out how to become a famous director. “I have always considered that with all the setbacks I had, the fact that I didn’t give up is maybe the one thing in my life that I am most proud of,” he says. “I just knew I would live a life of unfulfilment if I didn’t keep trying.
“So I just kept at it and by the time I wrote Reservoir Dogs it was time. It was time. And then as much as everything else was just this huge build-up to this tremendous let-down, this was…” He pauses, holding the next word in his mouth, relishing the feel of it, “…easy! I wrote the script quickly and we were making the film in, like, seven months.” The movie premiered to acclaim at the 1992 Sundance film festival, securing Tarantino’s reputation, at the age of 29, as one of the most exciting new talents in the business. “It was,” he says, “the complete utter payoff of perseverance.”

And on the flip side to straight up perseverance, here's an article by Richard Walter regarding trying to hit a target by aiming at it. Check it out here.

Terry Rossio on No Permission Filmmaking

"You can not in this town wait for permission. This is the wild wild west. This is a town where if you want to be something you say that you are and you make it happen and then you are that thing."








Among Terry Rossio's credits:
Shrek
Pirates of the Carribean
Men in Black
The Mask of Zorro
National Treasure

"The shell must break before the bird can fly" -Tennyson

"A simple farm boy teams up with a mysterious hermit to rescue a princess before joining a group of interstellar resistance fighters in conflict with an evil gallactic empire that has recently completed construction of a devestating superweapon."

I rest my case.

Now we can see why so many people turned George Lucas down. But if he could get things going with that log line, I can get a Mexican Wonder Woman going!