I’m a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I’ve always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I’m writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

Tarantino describes a hands-on, music-first approach to filmmaking rooted in his identity as a vinyl collector. Rather than treating music as a late-stage embellishment, he frames it as an active writing tool: he auditions tracks while drafting scenes to discover tone, rhythm, and emotional “attitude,” especially for action beats like fights. The quote also highlights his curatorial sensibility—mining soundtrack albums and deep cuts to create distinctive, often anachronistic pairings that become inseparable from the images. In effect, his record room functions like a private archive, shaping narrative pacing and character energy through preexisting songs rather than conventional score alone.