“Nobody Is Acting in Their Real Voice”

Quentin Tarantino is so committed to telling American stories that, as he prepares his reportedly final film, he won’t look outside the country in its casting. In a new interview with Deadline, the director stated that he refused to cast a British actor to play an American role, lamenting that “nobody is acting in their real voice” these days.

“Obviously, nothing against the Brits, but we’re living in a really weird time now,” Tarantino said. “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.”

Of course, Tarantino admitted that this phenomenon could be happening because we have a plethora of British actors talented enough to pull of a convincing American accent. As for equally talented Americans? “I would say that for the most part the Americans gave up their own ground,” he said. “I think it’s just a case that a bunch of Brits became more famous than the others. The Americans ceded their own ground. When I look at ’70s cinema I want to see Robert De Niro, I want to see Al Pacino, I want to see Stacy Keach, you know, I want to see people like that reflecting the culture back to me.”

It’s worth noting that Tarantino hasn’t exactly been stringent in this newly announced rule of his: Australian actor Margot Robbie portrayed American actor Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Perhaps with his last film, however — based on a critic who “used to write movie reviews for a porno rag” — he’s aiming for new levels of purity.

As Tarantino preps The Movie Critic, revisit our definitive ranking of his films.