Quentin Tarantino admits ‘Grindhouse’ flop taught him a lesson

Ambitious 2007 double feature was the first box office disappointment of Tarantino's career

Quentin Tarantino has admitted that he learned a valuable lesson when Grindhouse flopped at the box office.

The 2007 horror film was an ambitious double feature pairing Planet Terror, a segment written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, with Death Proof a segment written and directed by Tarantino. The project’s impressive cast included Rose McGowan, Michael Biehn, Josh Brolin, Naveen Andrews, Fergie, Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell and Rosario Dawson.

Though Grindhouse proved popular with film critics, it failed to attract a mass audience, becoming the first – and to date, only – box office flop of Tarantino’s career. “I learned a big lesson with Grindhouse, and I try not to repeat the mistake,” the director admitted in a new interview with Vulture.

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“Robert Rodriguez and I had gotten used to going our own way, on these weird roads, and having the audience come along. We’d started thinking they’d go wherever we wanted. With Grindhouse, that proved not to be the case. It was still worth doing, but it would have been better if we weren’t caught so unaware by how uninterested people were,” he explained.

Tarantino has since bounced back with 2009’s Inglourious Basterds and 2012’s Django Unchained, the highest-grossing movies of his career. His next film, a pitch black western called The Hateful Eight, opens in UK cinemas next January.

Meanwhile, Tarantino has also revealed that he is not a fan of the way Wes Craven directed Scream, and admitted that he would have been interested in directing the 1996 slasher flick himself.

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