In the Russian-language segment of the Internet you can find a phrase attributed to the cult American director. We checked to see if he said anything similar.

Quote: “Making films, not children, is my motto. Fuck the snotty little bastards. I want to have fun" mentioned in the book "Dialogues are my thing. Tarantino's Black Commandments" (by Mickey Knox), in popular posts in Facebook, in "VKontakte" And X, as well as online quotation books. In February 2025, a resident of Sevastopol who published this statement on social networks was sentenced by a Russian court to a fine of 50,000 rubles. for “promoting the attractiveness of not having children.” They talked about this "Caution news", The Insider and other publications.

Screenshot of a publication by a resident of Sevastopol, given in press release Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation

In 2018 Tarantino got married on Israeli singer and model Danielle Pick. Two years later, shortly before the director's 57th birthday, the couple had son, and two years later - daughter. In January 2025 Tarantino stated, that he doesn’t want to shoot his new (expectedly last) film until his first-born son is at least six years old. So the filmmaker’s current life directly contradicts the viral quote - at least since the release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, he has been focusing on children, not films.

Moreover, the phrase you are looking for is not found in English, and in Russian it is not cited in any relevant authoritative source or at least with reference to a specific interview. Some Russian-language resources referred to the above-mentioned book by an author named Mickey Knox. So name American actor, after whom Tarantino named the main character in the script that became the basis for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. However, it was not he who wrote the book about Tarantino in 2020 (the artist has been dead for seven years), but the Russian woman Elizaveta Migunova, publishing under the pseudonym Mickey Knox. Apparently, she took the quote for her work from the Internet.

Therefore it is not surprising that many popular Telegram channels that told the Sevastopol resident about the fine clarified that she was sentenced for a fake Tarantino quote. However, this is not an entirely true statement. The director did not always adhere to his current life priorities: for a long time he did not start a family, despite many novels. In 2009, in an interview with the magazine GQ Tarantino stated:

“When I make a movie, I don’t do anything else. All for the sake of cinema. I don't have a wife. I don't have a child. Nothing can stand in my way. <…> I’m not saying that I will never get married or have a child before I’m 60. But I have made the decision to walk this path alone for now. Because this is my time. This is my time to make films."

Ten years later in an interview with a magazine Time Tarantino made it clear that this approach has exhausted itself:

“I built my whole life to do this. I didn't get married, I didn't have children. I just decided that this was my time to make films. <…> And now it is coming to an end. I want to be able to do other things and not put my life on the line like I have for the last 28 years. I'm not upset about it."

So while Tarantino didn't say "make movies, not kids" as his motto, he was talking about the time to make movies and contrasting it with the time to have kids. He also didn't call the kids little snotty bastards or express a desire to have fun instead of spending time with them. This is a highly distorted and lengthened version of a quote from a GQ interview. began to spread in RuNet from about 2013 year. And before that about two years circulated a short version of “Now is the time to make films, not children,” which can be considered intermediate between the original statement and the current viral version. At the same time, the director confessed, that in the early 2000s, as now, he suffered from “baby fever,” that is, he felt a strong desire to have children.

Cover photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons