Quentin Tarantino’s shocking money confession

He’s worth $160 million, but in a shocking new interview director Quentin Tarantino explains why he’s barely given his mother a cent.

Quentin Tarantino has revealed in a new interview that he vowed as a kid never to share a penny of his movie-making fortune with his mother, because she allegedly discouraged his writing career.

The Oscar-winner told Billions co-creator Brian Koppelman on his acclaimed podcast, The Moment, that he first began writing screenplays in school, but got into trouble with his teachers, who, “looked at it as a defiant act of rebellion that I’m doing this instead of my school work”.

The Pulp Fiction director, now worth an estimated $160 million, reportedly wrote a script called Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit when he was just 12.

Tarantino shared with Koppelman that he struggled academically in school.

“My mum always had a hard time about my scholastic non-ability,” he said.

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Tarantino says his mother did not support his earliest filmmaking efforts. Picture: AFP

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“She was b**ching at me [about being in trouble for writing at school] and then in the middle of her little tirade, she said, ‘Oh, and by the way, this little ‘writing career,’ with the finger quotes and everything. This little ‘writing career’ that you’re doing? That sh*t is over!’”

Tarantino recalled, “And when she said that to me in that sarcastic way, I was in my head, and I go, ‘OK, lady. When I become a successful writer, you will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for Mummy. You get nothing. Because you said that.”

Koppelman asked Tarantino, “Did you stick to that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tarantino said. “I helped her out with a jam with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. But no house. No Cadillac, no house.”

Tarantino said his mother is still living, but added of his decision long ago to cut her out financially, “There are consequences for your words as you deal with your children, remember there are consequences for your sarcastic tone about what’s meaningful to them.”

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Tarantino – seen here with Aussie actress Margot Robbie – says he’s never bought his mother a house or a car. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

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His mother, Connie, was reportedly 16 when she gave birth to Quentin in Tennessee, and they subsequently moved to LA when he was four.

In 2003, the New Yorker wrote of the director’s childhood that one biography, “correct[ed] the … legend that had grown up around Tarantino since the release of Reservoir Dogs: that he was a dirt-poor illiterate hillbilly from Tennessee, brought up by a teenage dropout.”

The piece quoted Tarantino’s mother as telling film critic Jami Bernard – who penned the book, Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies – “Quentin would have you believe he was raised by wolves.” But the New Yorker reported of Connie, “It’s true that she was born in Tennessee and had Quentin when she was 16, but he was an accident. She got married in order to become an emancipated minor and go to college; she was, therefore, furious to discover that she was pregnant after her husband, Tony Tarantino, had assured her that he was sterile. She was angry enough to divorce him, and she didn’t introduce him to his son until Quentin was a few years old.”

During the wide-ranging 90-minute talk on The Moment, Tarantino also detailed how he serendipitously cast Christophe Waltz in his 2009 epic, Inglourious Basterds, and then inventively had Waltz rehearse separately from the rest of the cast, including Brad Pitt, to keep the foreign actor’s vast talents under wraps until cameras rolled.

He also discussed his new novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Koppelman, whose credits also include Rounders and Ocean’s Thirteen with writing partner David Levien, recounted how he’d read and admired Tarantino’s screenplays for Natural Born Killers and True Romance before they were ever sold as films. He also told Tarantino of his writing: “Thank you for all the gifts that you’ve given me. You read me the first 15 pages of Kill Bill on an aeroplane one time … it was really an incredible experience, and so inspiring. Just the impact your work has had on me is really indescribable.”

Tarantino also mentioned he is a Billions fan who unusually discovered the TV series in Israel. The director, whose wife is Israeli, reportedly moved to Tel Aviv for three months, but wound up staying longer because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission

Originally published as Quentin Tarantino’s shocking money confession