Quentin Tarantino Says DEATH PROOF Bombing Was a "Shock to My Confidence" and Discusses Lack of Sex in His Movies

Quentin Tarantino has been out on a book tour for his Cinema Speculation, and in one interview with Spain’s Diari ARA, he opened up about his 2017 movie Death Proof and how bombing at the box office was a shock to his confidence.

Death Proof was part of the Grindhouse house double feature that also featured Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Death Proof was definitely the better film of the two, and it centered on a Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), “a professional body double who likes to take unsuspecting women for deadly drives in his free time. He has doctored his car for maximum impact; when Mike purposely causes wrecks, the bodies pile up while he walks away with barely a scratch. The insane Mike may be in over his head, though, when he targets a tough group of female friends, including real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell (who served as Uma Thurman's double in Kill Bill), who plays herself.”

When talking about the movie, and how it affected him and his career, Tarantino explained:

“I have been lucky enough to write stories that have connected with many people, and this has allowed me to practice my art without the restrictions that most filmmakers have. Now, a funny thing happened: for a while I was getting a lot of project proposals, until the studios ended up assuming that I do my stories and it wasn’t worth the effort. But after ‘Death Proof,’ which didn’t do well at the box office and was a bit of a shock to my confidence, I started getting proposals again.

“They must have thought, ‘Perhaps now he’s touched and his temper has gone down, now is the time, and there’s nothing wrong with making commissioned movies for Hollywood. They always offered me interesting projects. But I preferred to reinvest in myself and made ‘Inglourious Basterds.'”

I actually liked Death Proof and I wonder if the movie would have done better had it been released as a single movie instead of a double feature. Tarantino previously told Empire that he overestimated audience’s excitement for a double feature release:

“With ‘Grindhouse,’ I think me and Robert just felt that people had a little more of a concept of the history of double features and exploitation movies. No, they didn’t. At all. They had no idea what the fuck they were watching. It meant nothing to them, alright, what we were doing. So that was a case of being a little too cool for school. But as far as the movie playing in England as the movie, I think people took it okay.”

The filmmaker went on to talk about the lack of nudity and sex in his movies explaining that it just hasn’t been necessary for the stories that he tells. He said:

“It’s true, sex is not part of my vision of cinema, and the truth is that, in real life, it’s a pain to shoot sex scenes, everyone is very tense. And if it was already a bit problematic to do it before, now it is even more so. If there had ever been a sex scene that was essential to the story, I would have, but so far it hasn’t been necessary.”

Tarantino is currently prepping to direct his next film project, The Movie Critic, which is set in the ‘70s and will follow a male film critic. We have no other details beyond that.