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Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to the Cannes Film Festival and has screened several of his movies at the acclaimed cinema event of the year. The director recently noted the special screening that the French film festival put on for his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs.
“It played at the Palais; it was like official selection outside of competition,” Tarantino recently told Deadline. “They invented something for our screening that they’d never done before; they put an orange sticker in the ticket that said: This movie may be too violent for you to watch.”
He continued, “And they’d never done that before, and they ended up putting the same sticker on Pulp Fiction when it played here in 1994. And then at some point with Lars von Trier, they stopped putting the sticker on.” So Tarantino’s promotion was truly unique.
Tarantino also noted his personal relationship with Cannes, having seen the 1979 film An Almost Perfect Affair, which takes place during the festival.
“I totally knew what Cannes was. I’d heard about it forever,” he said, “and that whole movie takes place at the Cannes Film Festival and I’d always heard about the Palme d’Or and I’d heard about the Directors’ Fortnight and it was literally a dream to come out here.”
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Elsewhere in the same interview, Tarantino discussed his next movie, The Movie Critic, which will go into pre-production next month. However, the director has admitted that he does not want the lead role to go to a British actor despite there being a swathe of talent coming out of the United Kingdom.
In a new interview with Deadline, Tarantino said, “No,” he said empathetically when asked about casting a British actor. “The truth of the matter is, yes, obviously, a Brit could pull it off, but I don’t want to cast a Brit. Obviously, nothing against the Brits, but we’re living in a really weird time now.”
He added: “I think when people look back on this era of cinema, and it’s just all these British actors pretending to be Americans and all these Australian actors pretending to be Americans, it’s like phantoms. Nobody is acting in their own voice. We just happen to be in an era of really, really good British actors who, for the most part, can pull it off.”
Tarantino is keen to stress that he doesn’t hold anything against British actors, though, noting, “By the way, I’m not being xenophobic. The Brits would have a hell of a lot more problems if a bunch of American actors came over there with their Dick Van Dyke [Mary Poppins] accents playing famous Brits. They don’t want to see that shit.”
