Shoot To Thrill

If there’s one annoying thing about interviewing Quentin Tarantino it has to be the carpal tunnel syndrome you get later from transcribing everything he says. A big gregarious fellow, he seems to fill up his not inconsiderable suite at the Clarence Hotel, talking with his hands, talking with his eyes, and most of all, talking with his mouth.

Just as his films are buckshot with cultural bric-a-brac, he fires off on, well, just about everything. Bang. Within minutes he has covered Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! star Tura Satana, British playwright David Hare, slaughter-fest western Soldier Blue, seventies softcore starlet Christina Lindberg and the feminist academic Carol J. Clover. Each pronouncement is bookended by that famous machine-gun laugh.
Yep. You have to stay on your toes if you find yourself in a room with Quentin Tarantino. His voice is slightly hoarse from promotional duties for his new film Death Proof but he is undeterred.
“This is just great, this is fun,” he says, with the enthusiasm one sometimes encounters in an over-excited debutant director. In the 15 years since he exploded onto the scene with Reservoir Dogs, his desire to mouth off to film journalists about his work does not seem to have diminished. Either that or, contrary to many critics’ jibes, he is actually the World’s Greatest Actor.
“It might sound presumptuous but I am an artist so I’m not going to be embarrassed about talking about my legacy or my art. In fact I want to talk about it,” he says.
There’s a touch of Jay Gatsby about Quentin Tarantino. A ringmaster, a magician, a marvel of self-invention, he is charmingly and supremely confident. He wants you to know that he’s shooting for the stars. And he doesn’t do false modesty because that would make him “a fucking liar.”
“I remember after Reservoir Dogs I was at this festival in Avignon, France,” he resumes. “I had done one movie. I hadn’t even started writing Pulp Fiction yet. And I was on some panel with a lot of young filmmakers there, and we were asked ‘What are your aspirations? What are your dreams in this business?’ Now everyone was kind of being shy and saying: ‘You know, I want to do this and I want to do that’. And they came to me and I go: ‘Well, I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I want to be considered one of the greatest film directors that ever lived…. I want to be one of the masters’. And now I am.”
That big, brash, quintessentially American way of thinking has served him well – though, inevitably, egos have been bruised along the way. As soon as Pulp Fiction made him the most instantly recognisable auteur on the planet, the usual coattails and cast-offs emerged to tattle across countless, hastily published biographies. The Tarantino industry was now open for business. Suddenly, people like Jane Hamsher and John August, two producers on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, were landing book deals for the production diary from a film Tarantino had completely disowned. More recently, Tony Tarantino, the biological father Quentin has never met, has decided to trade on their connection to flog his crooning lounge records.
But the aspiring filmmakers and obsessives who snapped up those books and articles, hoping to recreate themselves in Quentin’s image, had it all wrong. The greatest of all the Great Tarantino myths is that he’s a kind of savant; that if you just watch all the movies you can, if you carefully study Blow Out and Rio Bravo and Straight Time and Women In Cages, if you work out all his reference points, then you too can be a filmmaking genius.
The legend has it that the kid with ADHD from a single parent household, who didn’t excel academically, sought refuge in film theatres until, one day, he struck it lucky with a screenplay. This, however, is a rather selective view of Tarantino’s biographical history.

It is true that Quentin hails from a one-parent household. Connie Zastoupil, his mother, was only 17 when she had him, and his father didn’t stick around. Being a young, single mom in 1963 must have been tough, but she moved from Knoxville, Tennessee to LA, qualified as a nurse, and has worked her way up to become a player in the health insurance industry.
She has always insisted that Quentin was not the result of “some grubby teenage pregnancy” but her ticket to legal emancipation. Either way, her influence over her charge has been remarkable. She was the one who dragged him to the cinema, regardless of the certification, throughout his childhood. She read Moby Dick aloud to him in its entirety. It is often said she called him ‘Quentin’ after Burt Reynolds’ ‘Quint’, but he is equally named in reference to the second chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury.
In turn, Tarantino’s female characters are strong, smart women because, as he puts it, he “doesn’t know anything else”. He frequently includes formidable nurses in his screenplays, most notably Bonnie in Pulp Fiction and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill Vol. 1. He also digs single moms, including Alabama in the original draft of True Romance, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Rosario Dawson’s Abernathy in Death Proof.
“I guess I do,” he tells me. “It isn’t a conscious thing. But actually one of my favourite lines in Death Proof is Abernathy’s line to the other girls about excluding her because ‘she’s a mom’. I think that’s the best line of dialogue I’ve ever written. It gets something about the way women view each other.”
And sure, you can still see traces of Quentin the video geek, the gangly youth who worked alongside Roger Avary in Video Archives on Manhattan Beach. When we’re swapping tales about prized DVDs, he suddenly comes over wistful for the old days.
“Having stuff re-mastered is great and all,” he ventures, “but haven’t we lost something? Wasn’t there something great and taboo about watching bad recordings on clunky old cassettes?”
It’s a poignant enquiry for anyone of a certain age. The notion, however, that Quentin Tarantino is merely ‘one of us’, the guy who used to sign his autographs with the legend ‘I made this movie for us’, a video buff made good, couldn’t be further from the truth. If he wasn’t an exceptional scholar, that’s because he was already out shooting his own movies. By 14, he had completed his first screenplay, The Amazing Adventures Of Mr. Lee. At 21, he embarked on his abortive first feature, the romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Girlfriend.
Those, meanwhile, who seek to copy the Tarantino alchemy, grafting bubblegum conservation to genre, and tricking about with chronology, will fail more often than not. What he does appears to be effortless. But as the wave of Pulp Fiction clones released throughout the nineties demonstrates (Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, The Boondock Saints, Two Days In The Valley), being Quentin Tarantino is a lot harder than it looks. He knows it too. He knows that he changed everything. He made Miramax one of Hollywood’s most powerful players. He paved the way for a whole new genus of gabby indie filmmakers. Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Eli Roth, Kevin Williamson and a whole host of others could only have emerged in a post-Tarantino universe.
“I consider myself an artist more than I consider myself a movie director,” he avers. “That’s not putting anybody down. It’s just if there’s a pub where JD Salinger hangs out and where Bob Dylan hangs out, then I want to hang out in that pub. Now it’s up to you guys to determine whether or not I deserve to hang out at that pub – but that’s what I’m going for.”

While we’d be happy to let him in that pub any day, his glittering career has just hit its first speed bump. Grindhouse, initially created as a kitsch double-bill featuring Tarantino’s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, took only $11.6 million on its opening weekend. Panicked, the film's distributors asked Tarantino to return to the editing room. The result is a two-hour cut of Death Proof, released in this territory as The Fifth Film By Quentin Tarantino. For his part, he insists we’re not being gypped, that today’s teenagers simply didn’t understand the concept of a double bill. Tellingly however, he anticipates a Grindhouse reunion in the DVD afterlife, “once everybody stops being so precious about it.”
Certainly there’s logic to the Grindhouse divorce that goes beyond crass commercial imperatives. Borrowing something of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the film neatly doubles up on itself. The plot follows two groups of foxy chicks, talking about cars and liquor and boys, hanging out in bars and smoking weed, when all the while, Kurt Russell’s serial killer, Stuntman Mike has them in his sights. Watching it now, it’s clear that, as Tarantino puts it, the film “became this whole other thing” while he was shooting it.
“When I was trying to get Reservoir Dogs made, people kept saying, you know, it’s not a movie, it’s a stage play,” he recalls, “but I wanted it to be a movie. But now Death Proof is the first thing I’ve written since then that has made me think, you know, down the line I want to do a play. Because when I was writing all the dialogue for that bar scene, I got real comfortable in that bar with those characters. And I can honestly say, if I hadn’t been locked into this Death Proof/Grindhouse thing, I don’t know where it would have gone. I might have just stayed in that bar. Maybe Stuntman Mike wouldn’t have been a killer. Maybe he would have been a good guy. Who knows? I didn’t need to leave. But I had places to go and I knew I had to go there. Still, it got me thinking that now is the time to review things and actually sit down and write a proper play.”
Sure enough, though Death Proof was conceived as tribute to the scratchy exploitation cinema of the seventies, the lengthy stretches of girl-talk leave you in little doubt that Tarantino has written his first chick-flick.
“That’s exactly it,” he nods. “It’s a movie about female empowerment.”
A movie about female empowerment that features a lap-dance?
“Okay,” he laughs. “Well, even I don’t buy that completely. But I do know girls that do lap-dances and they’re not just strippers. I’ve seen girls get up and do a lap-dance in a bar when they’re drunk. And these girls are really fucking drunk. Honestly, the women are all well drawn as I could make them. They sound like my friends. They sound like real girls talking about getting fucked up. These are girls of today, not me remembering how girls were in my youth. Having said that, I am dressing them up as sexy as possible. I’ve always prided myself on being a gentlemen when dealing with women, when dealing with actresses. I left the gentleman at home this time. Because you don’t want a gentleman directing an exploitation movie. So yeah, I put them in tight t-shirts and tight pants, but that part of the movie is set in Austin, Texas. And let me tell you, that’s not much of a lie about how girls dress in Austin.”
Fair enough.
Like Kill Bill, Death Proof both recalls and subverts the tropes of female revenge fantasies such as Thriller – En Grym Film.
“I’m a huge fan of that movie,” he confides. “I love Christina Lindberg. I’d watch her in anything. I actually have her autograph on my refrigerator. But the film is, I think, one of the most depressing movies ever made. It took me a couple of times to get through it. It’s rough. You can feel yourself being ruined while you’re watching it. It’s just so, so…”
He breaks off and shudders.
“It’s just so ‘nooooo!’. But I was never really going for the most oppressive genres, because I like my fucking dialogue. I like the wit and the fun until that stops. I want you to laugh and laugh and laugh – and then I want you to be horrified and disgusted. And then I want you to laugh again. That’s my whole thing.”
But the laughs and the awesome car stunts provide a sugar-coating for a decidedly highbrow enterprise.
“Have you read Carol J. Colver’s Men Women And Chainsaws?” he inquires.
Have I ever.
“Oh good. Because for me, that’s like the greatest book on horror ever written. And I used her theories for my own instruction for Death Proof. Now one of the things I’m real proud about is the fact that, without trying to say anything, but just through the storytelling, I position Vanessa Ferlito as the final girl. She’s the one who figures out that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. She’s the odd girl out with her friends. She’s no Pollyanna but her friends are a little bit more promiscuous than she is. Everything points a certain way and then I yank the rug out.”
The film, which is peppered with such lofty concepts, is very recognisably a Tarantino picture. Other films, including the director’s own, are referenced in almost every frame. I wonder if this is as far as he can possibly go with his trademark postmodern chicanery?
“Yeah, to one degree or another,” he agrees. “What you’ve brought up is actually really interesting. I dig that as far as the narrative strategy goes, the two stories are duplicates of each other. That duality gets very amusing at a certain point. You meet the other girls and they’re talking about the exact same shit as the first girls were doing. They even use a couple of the same phrases. There are exact touchstones to the two stories except they play out differently. It doesn’t look cute. Some people don’t even get it. It’s not really obvious. But it’s there. The films are almost remakes of each other but with different outcomes. That’s one of the cooler things about it. In terms of references, like the Mustang that’s Kill Bill yellow or the whistling theme of ‘Twisted Nerve’ on Rosario (Dawson’s) phone. That just comes from the simple observation that it’s one of the bigger ringtones in Western Europe. So it didn’t come out of nowhere. I’m having fun with this. I’m getting a little self-reflexive here. But I think the fans will think it’s fun. They’re the right kind of jokes for that sort of movie. But you’re right. It’s probably as far as I can go.”

Talking to Tarantino you can’t help but notice that the infrequency of his movies has more to do with restless energy than indolence. Over the past decade nobody has had more projects attached to their name. Remember Tarantino’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?
“The thing about that was – and I feel bad about it – but I’m probably the reason that movie has never been made. Because I had an interest in doing it, so the rights have hopped between different people over the past fifteen years. And I talk to them about it but I never quite refuse it and I never quite commit – so I end up fucking everybody up.”
How about his adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s cracking western novel Forty Lashes Less One?
“That was a heartbreaker,” he sighs. “I was really serious about that adaptation. I though it was the hippest Robert Aldridge movie never made, a really dirty seventies western. I had written about 25 pages of that adaptation when I actually finally had to let it go. I had been optioning it for a long time but I realised I’m probably not going to make it and I like it too much to produce. So the thing is – part of the reason I’m letting it go is that I just want to do originals. I don’t want my vision to even be – and this is no back talking on Jackie Brown, I adore that movie – but it is me once removed. Now I wrote all that and I’m happy to have done so. But from now on I’m leaving the Elmore Leonard adaptations to the guys who can’t write. For me, it’s too important that it starts with a blank page. If it starts from nothing. When you see Death Proof, when you see Kill Bill, when you see Pulp Fiction – remember, I started off with nothing but a blank piece of paper.”
It’s tempting to imagine that he got sick of adaptations around the time of the Casino Royale fiasco. He certainly still seems wounded when he talks about it.
“I really wanted to make Casino Royale but the Broccolis wouldn’t let me,” he shrugs. “They actually cut me off at the pass. I had a plan to take the material from them. And we tried to do a deal with the Fleming family but the Broccolis circumvented it. Think about it. I’m the reason that they made Casino Royale. Because the minute that I announced that I was interested in doing it, that became the book that all the fans wanted to see. They had actually said publicly that that book was un-filmable. So I brought them to the material and they didn’t so much as say ‘thank you’.”
Happily for fans, the Broccolis’ refusal to play ball has inspired Quentin to take another crack at Inglorious Bastards, his long-promised war epic.
“I’ve just started writing it again but it has a long way to go,” he reveals. “I finally figured out how to do it on the scale I want to do it on. It’ll probably be the biggest thing that I’ve ever done. Pulp Fiction was the first Mount Everest. Kill Bill was the second. Inglorious Bastards will be the third Mount Everest. I’m very conscious about my filmography because, you know, most directors fuck up their filmography. I’ve studied a lot of directors’ careers and you can see where shit goes wrong. It is usually when they get older and older and older or they do that one commercial project that really fucked them up or their one really personal movie that gets shit-on – and they never really get over it. So now they’re just doing star vehicles all the time. With the exception of Spielberg, that’s how it is. I have my fans but I think I have fans that aren’t even born yet. They’re not going to see these movies in order. They maybe won’t know shit about me until they see one of them and they like it and decide: that was pretty good let’s see another movie by him. I don’t want them to pick a dog. I don’t want there to be a dog. I used to want to be one of the masters. Now I actually think I’ve got that. I mean it’s debatable, depending how you feel about my work, but I actually feel I have accomplished that. Now I want to be considered one of the great writers.”
His people start bustling outside the door. Doesn’t he ever tire of being the ringmaster I wonder? Doesn’t he ever feel like pulling a Terrence Malick?
“You know a lot of people said that that’s what I did for the six years after Jackie Brown,” he laughs. “You have to be the first person who has not complained about my scanty output. And I mean ever.”

Death Proof is released September 21