Directors Who Only Direct Movies They Write

It's a well-known fact that Quentin Tarantino writes his own scripts, even when he's adapting a novel ("Jackie Brown"), and his writing is painstakingly specific and extensively detailed. That would make it challenging for any director to inject their own style into it — although Oliver Stone ("Natural Born Killers") and Robert Rodriguez ("From Dusk Till Dawn") have risen to the challenge, it's still rare — so it makes sense that he'd want to see his own stories brought to life. As Tarantino said in an interview with the Director's Chair, "I see the movie in my mind. Before I make the movie, I watch the movie."

Interestingly, though, Tarantino also attributed his scripting skills to the acting classes he took for six years before he began screenwriting. "Where I actually realized I had a little bit of talent at it was going to acting class," he explained. "I was always doing bizarre scenes. Little by little, I just started adding more and more to the scenes, and that was me learning how to write dialogue." That's just one of the many reasons why his approach is so impossible to imitate.

It's debatable whether he's a better writer than a director or vice versa, but his skill in creating compact dialogues is unquestionable. He also has a fearlessness about his work; some argue that his films unnecessarily include gratuitous violence and offensive language, but those are essential components of his films, like "Kill Bill" and the buckets of fake blood, "Pulp Fiction" with its offensive lines, and certainly, "Inglourious Basterds" would be less hilarious without Brad Pitt's gibberish fake Italian. Clearly, his start-to-finish process is paying off.