TARANTINO: Here’s a wonderful thing: The Siege of Firebase Gloria played for a week in Los Angeles. Cut to 15 years later, and it is now, among war-film fans, considered in the top five of all Vietnam movies ever made!
TRENCHARD-SMITH: And yet, I can’t get Sony Home Entertainment to put out a DVD, even though they have a high-def master.
Tarantino on location: When he says action, he really means it. (Andrew Cooper/The Weinstein Company)
(Courtesy Dalia Productions, Inc.)
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TARANTINO: They just don’t know, and won’t take the two seconds it takes to find out. But I’ve been on the Internet. I’ve gone to these Web sites. Cirio Santiago, for example, directed nine Vietnam movies back-to-back in the 1980s and ’90s, and you know what? They’re the best movies of his entire career. Nobody has ever done as many Vietnam movies as good as that. They’re like the great, low-budget WWII movies of the ’50s. They’re like great Combat! episodes, except set in Vietnam. One of them, Eye of the Eagle 3 — also known as Last Stand at Lang Mei— is just terrific. When you look up the reviews, they’re within a breath of The Siege of Firebase Gloria. There’s another one, called Firehawk, that almost plays like Reservoir Dogs set in Vietnam. They’re not about explosions; they’re all about the human drama.
TEAGUE: We haven’t talked about a producer of independent films who was my original inspiration, and that’s Robert Lippert.
TARANTINO: He produced those B Westerns.
TEAGUE: And Sam Fuller movies. That’s what really got me interested in making movies. Jack Nicholson was writing and producing for Robert Lippert. Fred Roos was producing for him. And Fuller directed three or four movies for him.
TARANTINO: Robert Lippert did Monte Hellman’s Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury.
TEAGUE: In the Philippines.
TRENCHARD-SMITH: Have you seen those movies that George Montgomery made in the Philippines?
TARANTINO: No, I know of them, but I’ve never seen them.
TRENCHARD-SMITH: They’re quite good. There’s The Steel Claw and Samar and Warkill. They all have great jungle combat. Some of them were period.
TARANTINO: Well, I’m a huge fan of Filipino cinema. I can defend Eddie Romero and Gerry DeLeon and Cirio Santiago till the cows come home. I have tonight, actually.
TRENCHARD-SMITH: When I first came to America in 1968, Warkill was the first exploding-blood-bag movie that I remember seeing. I thought, “This is great stuff. I want to do that.” It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up, but when The Wild Bunch came out in 1969, all bets were off. When I came to Los Angeles in 1970, the first movie I saw on Hollywood Boulevard was Slaughter, and they didn’t care that you could see the wires coming out of the actors’ trousers. The hell with the wires — everyone’s looking at the blood!
TARANTINO: Jack Starrett!
TRENCHARD-SMITH: Jack Starrett!
TARANTINO: If Jack Starrett were alive, he’d be sitting at this table. [To Richard Rush] You know, if you’re the king of the biker movies, he was the crown prince.
RICHARD RUSH: Thank you.
TARANTINO: One of the things I always loved about your stuff was that you started out Max Julien — the great Max Julien. Probably the single-most iconic performance in the history of blaxploitation movies was Max Julien as Goldie in The Mack. Not Superfly. Not Shaft. Not Pam Grier. Max Julien in The Mack is the Paul-Muni-in-Scarface performance of blaxploitation cinema, and he started in your movies.
RUSH: And after he did those blaxploitation pictures, he played in my first studio picture, Getting Straight.
TARANTINO: By the way, if you didn’t know this, Getting Straight was Ingmar Bergman’s favorite American movie of all time. He always cited Getting Straight.
RUSH: That script contains one of the proudest lines of my writing career, which is when Elliott Gould says, “You’re not a woman. You’re just a guy with a hole in the middle!”
TARANTINO: My love-of-my-life girlfriend, when I was in my early 20s, was a literature major going for her professorship, just like the Elliott Gould character. And Getting Straight was her personal favorite of all the movies we watched together. She loved the constant literary talk of that movie. There were two movies, out of three years of showing her movies, she loved the most: Getting Straight and — check this out — Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love. So, on top of all your cinematic genius, thank you for giving me that moment with a woman I loved so much.
RUSH: My pleasure.
TARANTINO: Gentlemen, I’m going to leave because I’ve got to start my press junket early tomorrow. Otherwise, I’d keep this thing going until 2 o’clock in the morning.
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