Quentin Tarantino Once Shared Doing ‘Jackie Brown’ Put Him off of Adapting Novels Into Films
Quentin Tarantino may be fond of his Jackie Brown, but he didn’t feel the film included his best work.
It didn’t help that somewhere along the way the often energetic Tarantino lost stamina writing it.
How Quentin Tarantino went from ‘Pulp Fiction’ to ‘Jackie Brown’
Tarantino once lit the world of cinema on fire with his Pulp Fiction. Fresh off the success of his sophomore feature, Tarantino followed Pulp up with Jackie Brown.
The movie would end up starring Pam Grier as the titular character. She would portray a flight attendant caught up in a world of crime.
Tarantino based Jackie Brown on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, an author who Tarantino admired.
“I had actually read the novel that Jackie Brown is based on, Rum Punch, not in galley form but somewhere in between published and galley form, almost just before I finished Pulp Fiction; I read it and I saw it. I just kind of saw the movie. I had always wanted to do an Elmore Leonard novel and it was a question of trying to find the right one,” Tarantino once told The Guardian.
After some deliberation, Tarantino felt confident that Rum Punch was the Leonard novel he wanted to adapt.
“I have wanted for a long time to adapt Elmore Leonard. He was the first novelist I read as a kid that really of spoke to me,” he said.
Quentin Tarantino didn’t want to adapt books into films after ‘Jackie Brown’
Jackie Brown shares a unique distinction from most of Tarantino’s other works. It’s the only film he’s directed that wasn’t a completely original piece. Since Jackie Brown, Tarantino hasn’t adapted another person’s work to the big screen. He opted to pull stories from his own imagination. This was because doing Jackie Brown showed him all of his movies had to come from him.
“One of the things that is fun about reading books is it puts you in a complete different environment,” Tarantino once told BFI. “If you read one of Ian Rankin’s books and you think you got a good excuse to go to Edinburgh and shoot this big Scottish thing that could be really fun. But I lost my stamina in the last quarter of the last lap of Jackie Brown and part of the reason was I wasn’t taking something I created from scratch from a blank piece of paper and turning it into a full project.”
Because of this, Tarantino felt the film might have been lacking in ways his other films might not have.
“When I finished the edit and got my cut the way I wanted, I was emotionally done. I believe people could say it’s my best movie, but there’s a slight once-removed quality, located somewhere in my balls where that doesn’t live,” he added.
Why Quentin Tarantino preferred telling original stories
There was a certain level of satisfaction Tarantino received from telling his own stories instead of adapting someone else’s. The Oscar-winner took great pride that the stories he’d put into the world wouldn’t exist if he didn’t exist either.
“Because to me, the glory in what I do is the fact that it starts with a blank piece of paper. You look at something like Inglourious Basterds, and that did — if my mother never met my father, that would not exist in any way, shape or form,” he once told Charlie Rose. “If my mother hadn’t met my father there would be no Inglourious Basterds in anyway. It started off with a pen and a piece of paper, and now I have a movie.”
