Quentin Tarantino Once Felt Some of His Filming Was Psychologically Harrowing to Child Actors
Quentin Tarantino has worked with a variety of actors in his career. This list of performers he’s collaborated with has also included child stars. But when it came to working with children, there were certain scenes in his own films he felt were perhaps too extreme.
Quentin Tarantino believed that movies can affect its audience
Tarantino has always embraced violence in his movies. The director is not shy about being a violent filmmaker at his core. His films often involve characters in deadly shootouts or other dangerous situations that sometimes end in a lot of blood and dismembered body parts.
“As an artist, violence is part of my talent. If I start thinking about society, or what one person is doing to someone else, then I have on handcuffs,” Tarantino once said according to Channel 4.
He agrees that movie violence can provoke a palpable reaction from the film-going audience. But it’s a reaction that he thrives off of.
“I’m a big fan of violence in cinema,” Tarantino once said in an interview on Life in Pictures (via The Guardian). “I believe Thomas Edison invented the camera to film people beating the s*** out of each other. It really affects the audience in a big way, but at the same time you know it’s just a movie. What I’m about is playing the audience like an orchestra. I’m like: ‘laugh. Stop laughing. This is horrible! Laugh!'”
Quentin Tarantino once felt some of his filming was psychologically harmful to child actors
Tarantino is no stranger to working with child actors. Perhaps one of his most well-known child performers is Perla Haney-Jardine, who had a starring role in Kill Bill. He’d also worked with young Julia Butters on his most recent project Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But although Tarantino isn’t known for his restrictions, there was one way the filmmaker restrained himself when it came to child actors.
“I’ve never believed in limits, because an artist can do anything he likes. But when it comes to filming, I wouldn’t take a real life child actor and stick them in some possibly psychological harrowing experience,” Tarantino once said according to Female First.
Tarantino brought up a particularly bloody and traumatic sequence involving a child character in his Kill Bill film. But even then, Tarantino took precautions when involving a child character in a violent scene.
“At the same time, Kill Bill has the whole cartoon sequence of [young character] O-Ren witnessing her parents getting killed. It is very harrowing. I think it is a great piece,” Tarantino continued. “But there is a difference between doing something animated and taking a five or six year old girl, dropping blood under her face and saying, ‘think about your mom being killed.’ I wouldn’t feel OK about doing that.”
Quentin Tarantino once shared why the violence might be toned down for ‘The Hateful Eight’
It could be argued that his recent films have reduced the amount of violence usually associated with his films. The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood have their share of blood and gore. But they might not be as overt as some of his previous efforts. This was because Tarantino learned how to use movie violence in a different, subtler way.
“One of the things I learned making [The Hateful Eight] is how to turn violence into a tone that runs through the story, that hangs over the characters’ heads, like their own sword of Damocles,” Tarantino once told Time Out. “You don’t know when the violence is going to happen, but you know it is going to happen. And you are just waiting for it. There is a long, long build up, as I put my chess pieces in place. I am playing chess and I have got to put them all in the right spot before I start killing them off, and I am asking you for some patience. But hopefully the suspense makes it worth it.”
