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Tag: quentin tarantino

  • With ‘The Fabelmans,’ Julia Butters Reaches New Hollywood Heights

    With ‘The Fabelmans,’ Julia Butters Reaches New Hollywood Heights

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    She has yet to reach high school, but 13-year-old Julia Butters is already building the career of any actor’s dreams. At the age of 10, she stole scenes opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. It was on that set where Butters would first meet Steven Spielberg, who cast her as a proxy for his eldest sister in his memoir film, The Fablemans. 

    “I saw Steven walking around the valet [at Universal Studios]. I waved to him through the window, he waved to me, and I was freaking out,” Butters tells Vanity Fair during a recent Zoom. “That was my only interaction with Steven Spielberg ever, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to him.’” 

    Her prediction didn’t age well. Just a handful of years later, Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s script, emblazoned with the Amblin Entertainment logo, came her way. “I was so excited,” Butters says. “I remember just being like, ‘Don’t blow it. You gotta try your best. You gotta try your hardest. We have to make this worth it.’ And it turned out to be worth it.”

    After securing the role of Reggie, inspired by Spielberg’s real-life sister Anne, Butters had just one question: “Is there a monkey in this movie?” The actor had watched Spielberg, a 2017 HBO documentary about the legendary filmmaker, which recounts the time his mother spontaneously brought a pet monkey home. “I had this joke on set where that was what made me want to do the movie,” she says. “That was the deal—if there was a monkey, I would work on it.” And how was it sharing the screen with an orangutan? Says Butters, “Crystal was such an incredible actress.”

    Spielberg’s love of his sister is clear throughout The Fabelmans, shown through details and observations too specific to be made up—from her likening the family’s Northern California move to being “parachuted into the land of the giant sequoia people” to asking when “Sammy” plans on making movies with roles for girls. Although often in the periphery, Reggie’s protectiveness over her mother, Mitzi (played by Michelle Williams), breaks through. During a camping trip, she shields her inebriated mother, dancing by the fire in a transparent nightgown, from prying eyes. And after learning of her parents’ split, she observes that it must be difficult for their mother to be “loved by someone who worships” her as their father does. 

    “She feels a responsibility to be kind of the mother of the family while her mom is out playing and dancing and having fun and living life,” Butters tells me of Reggie. “Her mother has such a way about her—this innocence, it’s like a breath of fresh air. She feels youthful and young and happy. She just radiates such a glow. Reggie really wants to protect that and keep that fire lit.”

    Butters, who plays Reggie from ages 13 to 16, grew similarly attached to her onscreen Fabelmans family—Williams as free-spirited mother Mitzi, Paul Dano as by-the-numbers father Arnold, fellow sisters Natalie (Keeley Karsten) and Lisa (Sophia Kopera), and Gabriel LaBelle, who plays the Spielberg-inspired character of Sammy. “We all built a safe space where you can say what’s on your mind if you’re feeling anxious or sad or happy,” Butters says. “And I think that was really important with such an intense set,” adding of her younger costars, “We were all geeking out over the fact that we had made our dreams come true, working with Steven.”

    When I ask Butters if she had jitters about meeting the real-life Anne, who would, after the period depicted in the movie, go on to cowrite and produce Big, starring Tom Hanks, she pauses. “I get nervous about everything, so that’s kind of a funny question.” Butters, who played a kid with obsessive-compulsive disorder on the ABC sitcom American Housewife, says she struggles with her own anxieties, which made their own appearance on the set of The Fabelmans.

    One day, a scene involving Reggie and Sammy quickly bantering while washing dishes was placed in front of Butters, who was in the thick of schoolwork, just 30 minutes before it was meant to be filmed. “I was having trouble getting it out on set,” she remembers. “I got super anxious because I was on a Steven Spielberg set and I really wanted to do the best I could. So of course when I couldn’t get it, I got frustrated with myself. And I beat myself up to the point of shaking.”

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • ‘Shang-Chi’ star Simu Liu pushes back on Quentin Tarantino’s anti-Marvel comments | CNN

    ‘Shang-Chi’ star Simu Liu pushes back on Quentin Tarantino’s anti-Marvel comments | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Quentin Tarantino has made it clear that Marvel movies are not his cup of tea, but actor Simu Liu has kindly reminded the director that the films and the studio behind them have provided underrepresented communities a chance to be seen on the big screen unlike ever before.

    “If the only gatekeepers to movie stardom came from Tarantino and Scorsese, I would never have had the opportunity to lead a $400 million plus movie,” Liu, the star of Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” wrote on Twitter. “I am in awe of their filmmaking genius. They are transcendent auteurs. But they don’t get to point their nose at me or anyone.”

    He continued: “No movie studio is or ever will be perfect. But I’m proud to work with one that has made sustained efforts to improve diversity onscreen by creating heroes that empower and inspire people of all communities everywhere. I loved the ‘Golden Age’ too.. but it was white as hell.”

    Liu seemingly made his comments on social media in response to a podcast interview Tarantino gave in which he criticized the “Marvel-ization of Hollywood.”

    The films, Tarantino said on the “2 Bears, 1 Cave” podcast, are “the only things that seem to generate any kind of excitement amongst a fanbase or even for the studio making them.”

    He also said that the actors who appear in those films are “not movie stars” because its “franchise characters that become a star.”

    Tarantino clarified before making his comments that he didn’t “hate” Marvel movies but said that he didn’t “love them.”

    This is not the first time the “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” director has had harsh words for the behemoth studio’s films – and he hasn’t been alone.

    As Liu referenced, Martin Scorsese is among the other legendary filmmakers who have publicly taken issue with the box office dominance of Marvel movies.

    Both filmmakers, meanwhile, have found themselves on the receiving end of criticism of their own – Scorsese for dismissing questions about the lack of female actors in his films and Tarantino for his lack of diversity in the cast of “Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood” and the violence against women often featured in his films.

    “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” made more than $432 million worldwide during the course of its box office run. As of last year, director Destin Daniel Cretton was set to develop a sequel.

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  • Quentin Tarantino is ‘not in a giant hurry’ to make his last movie | CNN

    Quentin Tarantino is ‘not in a giant hurry’ to make his last movie | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Quentin Tarantino appears on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” this week to discuss filmmaking and explains why his tenth movie will definitely be his last.

    “I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and it’s time to wrap up the show. You know, it’s…I’ve done it, I’ve given my whole life to it. And you know, I didn’t start a family until late in life,” Tarantino told CNN’s Wallace. “I’ve always kind of equated if you’re doing movies on, you know, on the level that I’ve been doing. Actually the level I’ve been allowed to do. It’s, I equate it to mountain climbing, and so this movie is my Mount Everest, and this movie is Kilimanjaro, and this movie is Fuji. And I’ve spent all that time on the mountain and I’m an entertainer. I want to leave you wanting more.”

    The “Kill Bill” director added that he doesn’t want to lose touch with fans of his movies or with what’s happening in the world.

    “I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch… already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now. And that’s what happens. That’s exactly what happens,” he said.

    Tarantino said while he knows how many films he will make, he has no idea what the last one will be about.

    “I’m also not in a giant hurry to make my last movie either,” he told Wallace. “So I’ve got my book, I’m doing a few other things and then I’ll figure out what the next movie will be.”

    He’s also figuring out what his idea of a movie even is now, with more and more people using streaming services to watch films instead of going to the theater.

    “Right now, I don’t even know what a movie is. Is that something that plays on Netflix? Is that something that plays on Amazon and everyone want and people watch it on their couch with their wife or their husband? Is that a movie? Because my last movie opened up in 3000 theaters and played all over the world for a couple of months,” he said. “Now the thing is, I don’t have the answer to that question, but I don’t think anybody else does either. I think it remains to be seen situation and so by that time I’ll know what movies even are a few years from now.”

    New episodes of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” debut Fridays on HBO Max and Sundays on CNN at 7 p.m. ET.

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  • Weinstein accuser takes stand in LA after New York testimony

    Weinstein accuser takes stand in LA after New York testimony

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    LOS ANGELES — The New York trial of Harvey Weinstein and its California sequel had a rare crossover Monday as the only accuser of the former movie magnate to testify at both took the stand in Los Angeles and said she was sexually assaulted by him in a Beverly Hills hotel bathroom in 2013 while repeatedly telling him “no.”

    Lauren Young said she was paralyzed by fear when Harvey Weinstein blocked her from leaving the bathroom, masturbated in front of her and groped her breasts.

    “I was scared of Harvey Weinstein — that he would hurt me, or send someone to hurt me, or ruin my career, or make my life hell,” Young told the court.

    When Young testified in New York in February of 2020, she was not one of the accusers whose stories would lead to Weinstein’s conviction for rape and sexual assault and a 23-year prison sentence. But prosecutors called on her to testify to help establish a pattern of Weinstein preying on women.

    In Los Angeles, Weinstein is charged with sexual battery by restraint for the same allegations.

    Young said Monday that in early 2013, she was a model who was aspiring to be an actress and screenwriter, and through Weinstein’s assistant, who had become a friend, she set up a meeting with him at the Montage Hotel on the night of Feb. 19, 2013, about a script she was working on.

    During the meeting, Weinstein said she should accompany him to his room to continue the talk while he got ready for an event.

    Young said Weinstein led her into the room and then the bathroom, and his assistant shut the door behind them and left them alone.

    She said she was stunned as he quickly shed his suit and got briefly in the shower, then stepped out and blocked her from leaving when she went for the door.

    “I was disgusted,” she said. “I had never seen a big guy like that naked.”

    She said she backed up against a sink and turned away from him. He then unzipped her dress and groped her with one hand as he masturbated with the other.

    Weinstein’s attorney Alan Jackson gave the two-week-old trial rare moments of visual drama with a pair of clothing demonstrations during cross-examination.

    He pulled out the dress Young had been wearing that night and got her to acknowledge that a DNA test failed to prove Weinstein had touched it.

    Jackson also tried to cast doubt on whether Weinstein could have slipped out of his suit as quickly as she described. He pulled off his own suit coat to demonstrate.

    “I’m just going to take my jacket off, I’m not going to go any further,” Jackson said.

    “Please don’t,” Young answered.

    When asked how Weinstein could have unfastened everything so quickly, Young answered that he may have gotten started while he was walking down the hall, a method she used to use for quick changes as a model.

    “Does Mr. Weinstein strike you as a model?” Jackson asked.

    “No, but he’s definitely a monster,” Young replied.

    Like all of the women Weinstein is charged with sexually assaulting at the trial, Young is going by Jane Doe in court. The Associated Press typically does not publish the names of people alleging sexual assault unless they give their consent, as Young has done through her lawyer.

    Young’s testimony closely hewed to her account during the New York trial. But during cross-examination, Jackson pointed out that it differed in many respects from her early accounts to police starting in 2018, when she called a hotline set up for reports about Weinstein after the #MeToo movement exploded.

    Young initially told detectives that the assault had taken place a year earlier, days after she had been at a dinner with Weinstein at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Jackson pointed out that she was saying the same as recently as 2020.

    “I was sure that I was sexually assaulted,” Young said.

    “That wasn’t my question,” the lawyer replied. “I’m asking about the time. Something that would stick in your mind.”

    Jackson also brought up her previous confusion about the site of the assault, and she acknowledged that she could not name the hotel in her first three interviews with authorities, the most recent in 2020.

    “I had pushed it out of my memory,” Young said.

    She decided it was the Montage when police suggested it and took her to the suite where Weinstein had been staying.

    “And since then your testimony and your statements have gotten far more detailed and far more colorful, right?” Jackson said.

    “My trauma, I got to relive it by walking through that room,” Young said. “I had been in other rooms and didn’t feel anything. When I walked in that room, I felt everything flow back in.”

    According to allegations in an indictment and court testimony, the assault of Young came the day after Weinstein raped an Italian model at a different hotel during the run-up to that year’s Academy Awards, where Weinstein was annually a major player.

    Weinstein, 70, has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of rape and sexual assault involving five women. He has said that many of those incidents were consensual, though in the case of Young his defense denies there was any sexual interaction at all.

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    Follow AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

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    For more on the Harvey Weinstein trial, visit https://apnews.com/hub/harvey-weinstein.

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  • SZA & Clyde: The “Shirt” Video Offers a Variation on Bonnie and Clyde and Pulp Fiction With Far More Betrayal Involved

    SZA & Clyde: The “Shirt” Video Offers a Variation on Bonnie and Clyde and Pulp Fiction With Far More Betrayal Involved

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    Every time SZA comes out of the woodwork, it always seems to be worth the wait (case in point: “I Hate U”). And her latest single and video, “Shirt” (soon to be frequently misspelled as “Shit”), is no exception to that phenomenon. Directed by Dave Meyers, it’s clear from the outset that SZA is riffing on the Bonnie and Clyde dynamic that Quentin Tarantino re-popularized in 1994’s Pulp Fiction with Ringo a.k.a. Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Yolanda a.k.a. Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) in the illustrious diner scene that serves as beginning and end points for the film.

    Indeed, SZA’s own narrative for “Shirt” begins in a diner, with her “Clyde” played by LaKeith Stanfield (of Atlanta fame). As the two sit facing one another in a booth, close-up shots on their serene countenances present a kind of sexual tension. Or at least, a tension. Sounding a bit like Madonna talking about Kabbalah in the 00s, SZA proceeds to inform her boo, “Color is light, light is energy—energy’s everything.” “What about these salt shakers?” he asks (forgetting that it’s a set of salt and pepper shakers). She confirms, “Energy.” “This table?” “Energy.” He leans in and then inquires seductively, “You and me?” The seduction, however, is ruined by the sudden realization that there’s another “energy” at the table. Specifically, “Clyde’s” goonish friend, who shouts, “Yo, come on!” in disgust. “Shut up nigga, damn!” “Clyde” screams as he slaps him upside the happy-face-hair-design head. In irritation, “Clyde” adds, “You see we talkin’?” He turns back to SZA and says, “You were sayin’?” Without missing a beat, she concludes, “Energy.” With that, the indelible beat (courtesy of the amazing Rodney Jerkins a.k.a. Darkchild) commences as SZA casually shoots “Clyde’s” friend in the cabeza, which we see briefly from the perspective of the inside of his busted-ass mouth.

    Meyers then cuts to a scene of the two dressed in nun attire as they enter a “church” that looks plucked straight out of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Inside, pregnant “nuns” hold neon blue crosses above their head with a cowboy hat-wearing “minister” in between them as other “nuns” in various states of undress and sexual poses also populate the scene. SZA and “Clyde” then open fire as a barrage of interspersed scenes featuring them generally causing mayhem ensue. This includes the sight of a dead, bloodied old lady in a trunk (covered in money, naturally), a dead clown in a stairwell and a dead construction worker on the ground. Just some average daily carnage, it would seem. But what else were we to expect with an opening verse like, “Kiss me dangerous/Been so lost without you all around me/Get anxious/Lead me, don’t look back/It’s all about you.” Such lyrics speaking of intertwined, “crazy love” coupledom could provide no other type of video concept. It’s almost a wonder SZA didn’t go the True Romance homage route instead, but then, Tove Lo sort of has the monopoly on that right now after writing a song of the same name about that very film for Dirt Femme.

    The presence of the aforementioned “church” atmosphere also accents SZA giving in to darkness even in places of (supposed) light—this being further evident when she sings, “Broad day, sunshine/I’ll find a way to fuck it up still” and “In the dark right now/Feelin’ lost, but I like it/Comfort in my sins and all about me.” And “Clyde” is all about him, too, as he breaks the cardinal rule of “crazy love” by popping SZA in the stomach (hence, “Blood stain on my shirt”) and driving off in a car with a license plate that reads, “NOCTRL” (an overt nod to SZA’s debut album being named Ctrl). But “Clyde” didn’t seem to get the message SZA was sending about “energy” earlier—and now, even her ghost has become that as it floats up out of her body (with “Clyde’s” own face/energy flickering in and out of her visage) and ostensibly gets recycled back into the universe.

    Maybe that’s how SZA is able to return and “haunt” “Clyde.” Not just when he looks in the rearview mirror and sees her reflection in it, but also when he ends up tied to a chair in a warehouse after crashing the car as a result of the shock that came with the vision of spectral SZA. After that crash, she reanimates into a new-but-same body in the warehouse as the fitting lyrics, “It’s what you say and how you do me/How I’m ‘posed to trust, baby?/‘Posed to love?/It ain’t supposed to hurt this way/All I need is the best of you/Baby, how I got to say it?/Give me all of you” play over the scene.

    Since “Clyde” suddenly can’t, for whatever reason, give all of himself, SZA has no problem walking away from her erstwhile boyfriend as he’s left to the proverbial violent henchmen. In the next scene, she appears with a shorter haircut in front of a trashcan fire as she turns around to shoot and kill her own shadow (something Peter Pan probably wanted to do more than a few times). We then see still another “version” or “energy form” of SZA ride off into the sunset on a boat during the video’s conclusion, a moment that speaks to the lines in the forewarning chorus, “Still don’t know my worth/Still stressin’ perfection/Let you all in my mental/Got me lookin’ too desperate/Damn (You ain’t deserve).” So, yeah, she up and left.

    Generously, SZA doesn’t leave her viewer entirely at the end of the video the way she does her man. For she provides us not only with a final iconic look (bombastic yellow eye makeup coordinated with a Dole shirt), but also with a snippet of her next single, “Blind.” This as we see her in the kitchen/dishwashing area of the same diner as before, standing next to the same “Butcher” (Isaak Adoyi) we glimpsed previously watching the now-dismantled couple at the table from his sequestered perch. Hopefully, a “Part 2” of this concept will follow. Just as Quentin offered a Vol. 2 for Kill Bill.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Best Stories From Quentin Tarantino’s Book Tour So Far

    Best Stories From Quentin Tarantino’s Book Tour So Far

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    Quentin Tarantino, now splitting his time between Israel and Los Angeles, is currently hot on the promotional circuit to hawk his new book. Cinema Speculation (out on November 1) is ostensibly a collection of essays pegged to several movies Tarantino saw at an impressionable age, but as one would expect given his own movies, it takes circuitous and amusing routes through the wider culture and the author’s own personal history. 

    One such tale, which he told on Real Time with Bill Maher,  describes a foundational movie-going experience. In 1972, one of his mother’s boyfriends, who apparently played football for the Los Angeles Rams, wanted to get in good with her, so took the 8 or 9-year-old out to see a double-feature. “You a cool kid, Q,” Tarantino remembered the mammoth man saying at an all-Black theater in Los Angeles. 

    Then two important things happened. The first film, which no one particularly wanted to see, was a metaphorical drama called The Bus Is Coming, and it did not go over well. Bored moviegoers began hollering back at the screen, and it was the first time he heard a reference to the act of oral copulation. Witnessing interactivity at a theater like this radicalized him, as did a heckler’s response to the film’s climax. When a young child finally shouted the picture’s title, “the bus is coming!” someone in the crowd fired back, “yeah well get on it and go fuck yourself!!”

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    More importantly, though, was the main feature, a Jim Brown movie. (He didn’t say which, but two that came out that year were Slaughter and Black Gunn.) Tarantino explained how he was living with his single mother and two female roommates, and did not have a lot of experience with masculine energy. “This is way better than fuckin’ fishing,” he realized, being in that audience. 

    “Creating movies for an audience, that goal of a Jim Brown movie in 1972 on a Saturday night is always what I’m trying to achieve.”

    To get back to Quentin’s mother, Connie Zastoupil, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… director dished some unexpected news on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier. Apparently, she dated not just this unnamed Rams player, but numerous professional athletes, including the L.A. Lakers’s Happy Hairston (who also had a small role in The Concorde … Airport ’79, which may just be the most Tarantino thing ever) and Wilt Chamberlain. When Kimmel joked that surely many people’s moms dated the 13x NBA All-Star, Tarantino somewhat proudly boasted that, while the two were never exclusive, they were together for about three years, and for a time, she was the basketball star’s “number one lady.”

    Tarantino also explained to Bill Maher how he puts his all into crafting a screenplay, comparing it to climbing Mount Everest. With a book, once the writing is done, it is done, but with a movie, you then have to go out and shoot the damn thing. But realizing he sounded whiney, he was quick to reverse himself, gloating, “my sets are known for being the funniest sets in Hollywood. The people in IATSE want to work on a Quentin movie, because they’re gonna’ have a ball.”

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    Jordan Hoffman

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