When Quentin Tarantino goes to the movies, he sits in the front. Not in the first row, where he’d have to move his head from side to side to see what’s happening in the corners, but the third or fourth row, where he can take in the whole screen and is aware of nothing but the screen. The trick is to exclude from his range of vision anything that would take him out of the movie, such as exit signs or wall sconces or just distance. He wants to be overwhelmed. Otherwise, what’s the point? He might as well be watching television. Because he sits so far forward, his head is tipped back and his whole face is opened to the screen, as though he were receiving Communion—mouth slightly open, eyes wide, fist-in-a-sock chin pushing forward, large, pale forehead flickering with the film.
When Tarantino comes home at night after a late double feature, he sometimes goes by himself to the theatre that he’s built in his house and watches a third movie. Then, at two or three in the morning, when he’s really exhausted and about to fall asleep, he’ll watch a fourth movie. There’s a red plush sofa at the front of the theatre where he sits when he’s alone, and about fifty red seats behind in gradated rows, for guests. The room is designed to look like an old-fashioned cinema, with wall-to-wall carpeting of a diamond-shaped design and velvet ropes supported by short brass poles. It is lit by a row of brass carriage lamps hanging by chains from the ceiling, and on the walls Tarantino has hung a series of photographs of a ruined movie theatre in Texas. On a table next to the sofa stand five or six piles of DVDs that he has recently watched or intends to watch soon: “The House with Laughing Windows,” “Short Night of the Glass Dolls,” “Fangs of the Living Dead,” “Flavia the Heretic,” “Beast of Blood,” “Legendary Weapons of China,” “Dirty Deeds,” “Seven Blood-stained Orchids,” “Mad Doctor of Blood Island,” “Candy Stripe Nurses,” “Private-Duty Nurses,” “Women in Cages,” “Spasmo.” It’s difficult to imagine what it must be like to inhabit Tarantino’s mind, crammed as it is with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of filmed images—eyes narrowing, hands fumbling, guns firing, bodies falling, car chases, chases on foot, empty streets, façades of houses, trees blowing, open doorways, taps running, unmade beds, storms through windows, and everything else you could possibly imagine seeing in a movie. One of the reasons that Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second.
Before Tarantino began making movies, one of his heroes was Jean-Luc Godard. He loved Godard’s unusual shots—the long takes, the long, long closeups. Even though he has now outgrown Godard, he named his production company A Band Apart, after Godard’s film “Bande à Part” (“Band of Outsiders”), and before he filmed the John Travolta—Uma Thurman twist contest in “Pulp Fiction” he showed the eccentric, peculiarly enthralling dance sequence in “Bande à Part” to Thurman, so she could see what he had in mind. Other influences are even easier to spot: Godard would take a hoary American genre like a gangster movie and make it lighter, more playful, more self-consciously a movie, and he would interrupt the action with endless conversations.
Nonetheless, one fact that says a lot about Tarantino is that he prefers Jim McBride’s 1983 remake of “Breathless” to the Godard original. The McBride version, in color, differs from the black-and-white Godard in exactly the ways you’d expect if you subscribed to all the oldest clichés about Hollywood and France: there’s less conversation, more running. Godard’s hero, played by the sublime Jean-Paul Belmondo, is affectless and cool, despite his love for the heroine, played by Jean Seberg. He’s a cool dresser, he steals cars for the hell of it, and he’s a cool killer, as amoral as a houseplant, killing existentially, for no good reason. Seberg is cool, too: she likes Belmondo more than she lets on, but she can live without him, and when she discovers he’s a criminal she handles it like a pro, bluffing her way out of an interview with the police. When McBride’s heroine, on the other hand, finds out that her boyfriend is being sought for murder by the police, she weeps. McBride’s hero, played by Richard Gere, is somewhat cool, but not very. He’s a sweet, clownish romantic who wears absurd, peacocky American clothes (a frilly red tuxedo shirt, plaid pants), and for whom driving fast is a crazy thrill. When he kills a cop, it’s completely by accident, and afterward he’s upset and scared. Tarantino says that he loved the McBride version because it was the kind of movie he could imagine making himself; and, indeed, the Richard Gere character is, in his sweetness and his clownish romanticism and his accidental crime, not unlike Clarence, the hero of Tarantino’s script “True Romance.” Godard was, in the end, too breezy, too detached, too motiveless, too delicate, too French to serve as a model. Godard said that when he saw a print of “Breathless” for the first time he realized that he’d made something completely different from what he intended: he’d thought he was making a gangster movie like “Scarface,” but he discovered that he had in fact made “Alice in Wonderland.” This is the difference between him and Tarantino, one of the differences that thirty-five years has wrought: Tarantino knows he’s making “Alice in Wonderland.”
“Breathless” is not the only remake that Tarantino likes better than the original. He likes L. M. (Kit) Carson and McBride’s screenplay version of “The Moviegoer” better than Walker Percy’s novel, which he found unemotional and dry. And he much prefers Adrian Lyne’s 1997 “Lolita” to Stanley Kubrick’s version, made in 1962. “I think Adrian Lyne’s ‘Lolita’ is a masterpiece,” he says. “When I saw it, I thought, Boy, I don’t know if Kubrick even read the novel. Kubrick manages to take that book and make this madcap comedy out of it that’s actually pretty terrific. But the idea that you can do a movie about Lolita and not have one single, solitary disturbing image in it at all is crazy. It’s fraudulent! I mean, to me he’s missing the most fascinating part of the work, which is looking through a pedophile’s eyes and actually going along with it.”
Tarantino is not, in general, a great fan of Kubrick—he finds Kubrick’s films too cold, too composed. He appreciates the films; he just doesn’t feel any affection for them. Still, he will say that the first twenty minutes of “A Clockwork Orange” are as good as moviemaking gets. “That first twenty minutes is pretty fucking perfect,” he says. “The whole non-stop parade of Alex and the druids or whatever they were called: they beat up a bum, they have a gang fight, they go to the milk bar, they rape a girl, they break into the house, and they’re driving and playing the Beethoven, and Malcolm McDowell’s fantastic narration is going on, and it’s about as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time. It’s like that long opening sentence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans,’ all right, that great run-on sentence that goes on for almost a page and a half. I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did you’re a fucking liar.”
Near the end of the second part of Tarantino’s new movie, “Kill Bill,” the heroine, who is known as the Bride and is played by Uma Thurman, tracks down her ex-boss Bill’s old mentor and confronts him in a Mexican whorehouse. (“Kill Bill” was originally conceived as one movie but is being released in two halves: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.) Tarantino had decided that the scene should be shot in an authentic Mexican whorehouse, so various scouts and production assistants flew to Mexico last winter and found, near an obscure beach resort ninety miles south of Puerto Vallarta, the place they were looking for. When the scouts found it, the whorehouse was more authentic than was really necessary—it lacked a bathroom and stood across the road from a pig slaughterhouse, so the floor was covered with feces of both human and porcine origin—but the scouts got it cleaned up and sent pictures of it to the production designers in Los Angeles. It was an extremely basic whorehouse—just a thatched roof over wood poles, with a dirt floor and a couple of hammocks—so the production designers installed a small bar at one end and a caged jukebox at the other and added some tin-can lampshades, a Foosball table, a few white plastic chairs, and a green parrot in a cage. Tarantino liked the idea of the slaughterhouse nearby, so the designers rented more pigs and some chickens. Shortly before the crew arrived to start shooting, there was a murder at the whorehouse and the police shut it down, which was a problem because Tarantino wanted to use the actual whores and their pimp in the scene. But, as it turned out, the establishment had simply moved a little way down the street, and the scouts found it again with no trouble.
The whorehouse scene was one of the last in the movie to be shot. It was February 12th: Day 150 in “Kill Bill” production time. Tarantino had shot the movie’s fight scenes the previous summer, in China and Japan, and in the fall he had shot indoors in L.A. In Mexico, the crew was staying at a breezy beach hotel called Costa Careyes, but the whorehouse was some distance inland, so it was very hot. It smelled faintly but pleasantly of dung. The rented pigs grunted in their pen across the street. The whores were short and chubby and wore tube tops and little skirts. One had been instructed to carry laundry from stage left to right; another lay in a hammock; two more pretended to play cards at a table. Uma Thurman, wearing a black leather jacket, sunglasses, jeans, and a dagger in a sheath attached to her leg, stood waiting in the doorway. Michael Parks, who was playing the mentor, sat in a wheelchair at the far end, aged by makeup and a white goatee, smoking Red Apple cigarettes (a little joke of Tarantino’s—he included the same fake product in “Pulp Fiction”). The parrot wolf-whistled softly in its cage.
Tarantino bounded around the set like a St. Bernard recently reunited with its owner, hugging people, ruffling their hair, laughing loudly, joking. In the confines of the whorehouse, he seemed larger and more ungainly than usual, as though he were not fully housebroken and had to be prevented from slipping on things and knocking over the equipment. He was wearing a baggy black T-shirt that read “Property of Too Black Guys Marketing Dept.,” and baggy black cargo pants. His face was red and moist from the heat, and in the course of shooting his hair had grown into a kind of Renaissance bowl shape, like Gérard Depardieu’s in “The Return of Martin Guerre.” Someone handed out Magnum ice-cream bars, and Tarantino started singing the Magnum advertising jingle. He seemed to be in a very good mood. He ran over to the whore in the hammock and adjusted the angle of her feet. He ran back to look at her through the camera. Suddenly the jukebox let forth a blast of loud music and everybody jumped. “Ooh, I hope I can still have children,” Tarantino said. When everything was ready, he settled into position, crouched on an upturned crate a foot or two from Parks, and stared at him. (While other directors direct from a bank of video monitors, some distance away from the action, it is a point of honor with Tarantino that he always sits as close to the actors as possible and watches directly so they can feel the force of his attention.)
“Michael, your cigarette’s kinda crooked,” he told Parks. The cigarette had slipped a hair sideways in its holder. Parks adjusted it. “Better. Michael, just so you know, your frame is very severe—you can’t really move past my hand,” he said, putting his hand an inch or two from Parks’s face. Parks nodded. “Silencio!” Tarantino bellowed. “Silenci-fucking-o!”
“I remember when he was only five,” Parks said, in character, reminiscing about the eponymous Bill. “I took him to the movies. It was a movie starring Lana Turner. And whenever she would appear onscreen, he would begin sucking his thumb to an obscene amount. And I knew right then, this boy would be a fool for blondes.”
Michael Parks is one of Tarantino’s favorite actors. He has wanted to cast him for some time, and now that he’s found a movie that’s right he has cast him twice, in two different roles. Years ago, when Tarantino was at a Sundance workshop, doing the final edits on his “Reservoir Dogs” script, he met Sydney Pollack and told him how much he admired an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episode that Pollack had directed which starred Parks. “Sydney Pollack goes, ‘Michael Parks! He was a damn good actor,’ ” Tarantino says. “ ‘What ever happened to him?’ And I was, like, ‘He didn’t go anywhere! Give him a fucking call! Bring him in for an audition! He just doesn’t have an agent who can get into your office anymore.’ ” Parks is the most recent in a series of actors whose careers Tarantino has resuscitated, of whom John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction” is only the most obvious example. He did the same for Pam Grier and Robert Forster in “Jackie Brown.” Both Grier and Forster were heroes of Tarantino’s childhood—Forster played the lead in a one-season early-seventies TV show, “Banyon,” that Tarantino loved; Grier was the star of blaxploitation movies such as “Foxy Brown,” “Coffy,” and “Scream, Blacula, Scream”—and both had seen their careers founder in the late seventies and had taken to playing small parts in bad movies and the low end of TV. “If you did know who Robert Forster is, there’s a sweet quality about seeing him have another day in court, seeing what a good actor he is,” Tarantino says. “It maybe makes you think, God, what a fucked-up business, how does a guy like that get thrown on the scrap heap? How many more of them are there out there? Well, there’s a lot.”
But Tarantino didn’t cast Forster and Grier for charity. (His brilliance at casting is one of the few things about him that people tend to agree on.) To him, the fact that they had been down and out added to their value. In “Jackie Brown,” part of what he had to do was convey cinematically all the backstory and the characterization that Elmore Leonard had had three hundred and fifty pages to get to in “Rum Punch,” the novel from which the film was adapted, and for that he felt he needed actors who had been around. “Robert Forster’s face is backstory” Tarantino says. “That was so with both him and Pam Grier. If you’ve been an actor in this business for as long as they have, you’ve seen and fucking done it all, all right? They’ve had heartbreaks and success and failure and money and no money, and it’s right there. They don’t have to do anything.”
When Tarantino says they’ve done it all, he means, equally, the roles they’ve played and the life they’ve lived. These things are not distinct for him: both create a kind of density or thickness in a character that you can’t get any other way. He loves actors’ baggage of all sorts. He likes to tell a story about the time Elmore Leonard visited the set of “Joe Kidd,” a movie he wrote for Clint Eastwood. At one point, Eastwood put his hand on his gun and his enemy didn’t draw his own gun because he was afraid. Eastwood objected that the enemy should not be afraid at that stage in the movie—how would he know that Eastwood was a lightning draw? The enemy wouldn’t, Leonard conceded, but that didn’t matter: the audience would know, because they’d seen his other movies. When Tarantino was preparing the set of “Jackie Brown,” he visited Robert Forster’s house and talked to him about his life (he likes to do this with actors), and he discovered that Forster’s father had been an elephant trainer for Ringling Brothers Circus. He collected a few family photographs and elephant-training tools from Forster and placed them in a glass cabinet in Max Cherry’s office; he thought of them thenceforth as the photographs and tools of Max Cherry’s father. Nobody who saw the movie would know why they were there, but he would know and Forster would know, and he felt that would make a difference.
Many critics have asserted that Tarantino’s characters are hollow, cartoonish figures (Forster’s and Grier’s characters are exceptions), functioning only as hooks on which various clever jokes can be hung. But while it is certainly true that most Tarantino characters are cartoonish, to conclude that they must therefore be hollow is to assume that substance or depth in a movie character has the same meaning—is made of the same stuff—as substance or depth in a person. Tarantino’s characters do not all have psychological substance; some (such as the Bruce Willis character in “Pulp Fiction”) are made, instead, out of history—out of predecessor characters whose clichés they inhabit and twist, in a movie character’s version of an Oedipal dynamic. This is as it should be: weighing down genre characters with real psychologies is risky. The otherwise lightfooted “Kill Bill” begins to lumber whenever Thurman’s killing-machine Bride turns maternal. When a Tarantino character launches into a riff about Madonna or Elvis, he may seem to be exhibiting a particular psychology, escaping the confines of his genre, but in fact those monologues sound very much alike. What’s being exhibited is not the personality of the character but the personality of the movie.
Moreover, Tarantino loves his characters. Several years ago, he commissioned an artist in Texas to make sculptures of some of them—Mia Wallace, from “Pulp Fiction,” Louis and Melanie and Max Cherry, from “Jackie Brown,” Mr. Blonde, from “Reservoir Dogs.” When he draws up a contract with Miramax, he has his lawyer include an unusual provision that secures him all the rights to the characters in the future, so that nobody can use them—for sequels or spinoffs or marketing or anything else—without his permission, and so that he can use them again himself in a movie whenever he likes. He intends gradually to build a whole Tarantino world, so that his movies intersect with one another. He has already started doing this: Mr. White, of “Reservoir Dogs,” used to do jobs with Alabama, the heroine of “True Romance”; Vic Vega, of “Reservoir Dogs,” is related to Vincent Vega, of “Pulp Fiction.”
One of the many personal genres that Tarantino has made up is “hangout movies”—movies whose plot and camerawork you may admire but whose primary attraction is the characters. A hangout movie is one that you watch over and over again, just to spend time with them. “Rio Bravo,” one of Tarantino’s three favorite movies of all time (the two others are “Taxi Driver” and “Blow Out”), is a hangout movie. Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused,” perhaps Tarantino’s favorite movie of the nineties, is another hangout movie, and when Tarantino is abroad, in a hotel or some apartment he’s rented, if he feels lonely he goes to a video store and rents “Dazed and Confused,” and then he doesn’t feel lonely anymore. The characters in the movie have become friends of his.
“Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” aren’t hangout movies, but Tarantino hopes that “Jackie Brown” has become one. He hopes that people will see it the first time just to get the plot out of the way, and then, whenever they feel in need of a certain sort of company, watch it again. “Jackie Brown,” he thinks, is the sort of movie that people tend to like better the second time, even better the third time, and maybe even better the fourth time. “You don’t watch it four times in a row,” he says. “It’s just that, for people who like it, I really wanted to give them a gift that they could watch for the rest of their lives. Every two or three years, put in ‘Jackie Brown’ again, and you’re drinking white wine with Jackie, and drinking Screwdrivers with Ordell, and taking bong hits with Melanie and Louis.”
The impact of “Pulp Fiction” was such that three book-length biographies of Tarantino were published before he was thirty-three, and a fourth appeared a few years later. The books went some way toward correcting the Agee-esque legend that had grown up around Tarantino since the release of “Reservoir Dogs”: that he was a dirt-poor illiterate hillbilly from Tennessee, brought up by a teen-age dropout. “Quentin would have you believe he was raised by wolves,” his mother, Connie Zastoupil, told Jami Bernard, the film critic of the New York Daily News. It’s true that she was born in Tennessee and had Quentin when she was sixteen, but he was an accident. She got married in order to become an emancipated minor and go to college; she was, therefore, furious to discover that she was pregnant after her husband, Tony
Tarantino, had assured her that he was sterile. She was angry enough to divorce him, and she didn’t introduce him to his son until Quentin was a few years old. She named her child after two fictional characters: Quint Asper, the Burt Reynolds character on the TV show “Gunsmoke,” and Quentin in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” She finished college, moved to Los Angeles, became an executive in an H.M.O., and raised her son in and around Manhattan Beach, a middle-class suburb just south of the airport.
Tarantino as a child was preoccupied with movies, and he was always writing. He wrote a screenplay called “Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit,” and each year for Mother’s Day he would write a little story for and about his mother in which she died at the end (he would assure her that he felt bad about the way things turned out). His taste in music then was mostly old school: he loved soul music, oldies, and rockabilly, and was obsessed with Elvis. (“I was really into rockabilly,” he says, “because it was the one time when white hillbilly cats were trying to out-peacock the black guys, and I dug that.”) He stopped liking school after kindergarten, and he dropped out for good in the middle of ninth grade. He’d been getting into trouble already, staying out late and drinking, and he was arrested once for shoplifting an Elmore Leonard novel from Kmart. When he finally announced that he was dropping out, his mother, angry but resigned, insisted only that he get a job. He went and got his first job in the film industry, as an usher at the Pussycat Lounge, a porn theatre in Torrance.
At twenty-one, Tarantino found his way to Video Archives, a video store near his home, where he worked for the next five years. His fellow-clerks were as obsessed with movies as he was, and so competitive with each other that one committed suicide because he was convinced that he would never be as successful as Tarantino seemed bound to become. Tarantino at the time was heavily into Bob Dylan and was a maniacal Brian De Palma fan. In the months prior to a new De Palma release, he would collect clippings about the film and arrange them in a scrapbook. The day the film came out, he would go to the first show, at noon, by himself. Then, having got the plot out of the way, he would see the film again that night (always the midnight show), with a friend. He wanted to be an actor, and he went to dozens of auditions, but nothing came of them except a one-time role as one of several Elvis impersonators on “The Golden Girls.” At one point, figuring his face might be the problem, he went to a plastic surgeon to see about getting his jaw shortened, but the surgeon persuaded him that he had a “characteristic look” and should leave it alone.
For a long time, in other words, he wasn’t getting anywhere, and he wasn’t happy about it. “I definitely had an angry-young-man thing going through most of my twenties,” he says, “because I wanted people to take me and my shit seriously, all right, and I was very full of piss and vinegar about it. When I wrote ‘True Romance,’ I’d give it to somebody to read and I’d say, ‘Now look, don’t read this like it’s a screenplay Quentin wrote. Treat it like it’s a novel you bought.’ ” He likes to say that if he hadn’t become a director he might have been a petty criminal. “Not only did I not go to college—I didn’t go to high school,” he says. “Through almost all of my twenties, I was making minimum wage. If that had been my life and I didn’t have something to work toward, then, yeah, I wouldn’t have been happy with working in a burger stand. I wasn’t going to be a garbageman, or work at the post office. I had mentors, older men that I met at very young ages, older black guys, con men, larceny, pimpish kind of things, friends of my mom and stuff. I was actually kind of excited about going to the county jail the first time I went”—he was arrested for refusing to pay his parking tickets. “I learned some great dialogue. But after the first time the bloom was completely off the rose. The last time I was there for eight days, and it was really hell.”
Tarantino wasn’t very successful with girls. He was penniless and gross. He didn’t shower very often and sometimes slept in his car (a Honda Civic). But he developed various ways of wooing. He would tell a cute customer that there was a problem with her account, and show her that in the store’s computer she was listed as “Dreamgirl.” He once borrowed a basket and a tablecloth to take a girl on a picnic, though he had to work, so the picnic took place in the parking lot of the video store. He was a romantic: he didn’t like porn movies, even when he was sixteen and working at the Pussycat Lounge. Later, he hired a U.C.L.A. graduate student in English named Grace Lovelace to work at the store because he liked her, and they dated for several years. “When I wrote ‘True Romance,’ I’d never had a girlfriend,” he says. “I always wanted a girlfriend but never had one. Alabama”—the heroine of “True Romance”—“wasn’t my dream girl, per se, but she was the kind of girl I always hoped I’d meet, a girl who would give me a chance and realize that I was really cool. Also, there was that whole dynamic of a girl who’s your pal. That was a very important thing to me back then.”
There is still something gawky and virginal about Tarantino. There’s almost no sex in his movies. He says that’s because he can’t deal with becoming yet another sleazy Hollywood director talking a girl into taking her top off, but it seems that, where his movies are concerned, sex just isn’t his thing. In “Kill Bill,” he even flouts sexy-female-action-star convention: when the Bride arrives to decimate bad guys in the movie’s climactic scene, she shows up not in heels and a bustier but wearing sensible sneakers and a loose-fitting tracksuit. (The outfit is an homage to the one worn by the late Bruce Lee in his movie “Game of Death.”)
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Tarantino and a guy he had met in acting class, Craig Hamann, tried, with a combination of favors and bits of money, to make a movie called “My Best Friend’s Birthday,” but after a series of disasters they gave up. Tarantino wrote the screenplay for “True Romance” in 1987 and sent it out repeatedly during the next four years. Finally, after a series of bitter contract complications, it was bought, and Tony Scott agreed to direct it. In 1989, Tarantino wrote another script, “Natural Born Killers,” which was eventually rewritten and directed by Oliver Stone; in response, Tarantino publicly disavowed it and refused to see Stone’s movie. In the end, Tarantino grew sick of losing his scripts and wrote “Reservoir Dogs,” a movie designed for a tiny budget—mostly the money he’d made from selling “True Romance” and “Natural Born Killers.” To keep the budget small, he set the movie in one location, a warehouse, and he made a virtue of that necessity by creating the sort of intense claustrophobia and paranoia that can arise only when characters with reasons to distrust one another are penned up and unable to leave. (He was inspired by the mood of John Carpenter’s remake of “The Thing,” in which a group of characters trapped in an Arctic outpost are, one by one, taken over by a monstrous alien parasite.) He showed the screenplay to Lawrence Bender, a young producer and former flamenco dancer with just one film—a low-rent horror movie—to his credit, and Bender vowed to drum up some real money, not the sixty thousand that Tarantino had been planning to use. Through a series of tenuous connections, Bender managed to get the script to Harvey Keitel, and, once Keitel was interested, the money followed.
Tarantino spent much of this spring and summer in a small room in a clapboard house in West Hollywood, in the company of his editor, Sally Menke, and her large black Labrador, Zoe. He and Menke sat at a long metal desk and stared at four monitors of differing sizes and went through the footage of “Kill Bill,” shot by shot.
I don’t know what car wash you worked before you came here that let you stroll in twenty minutes late, but it wasn’t owned by me—and I own a fucking car wash.
In each take, the actor said his line slightly differently—slower, faster, with more or less emotion—and had a slightly different expression on his face, and Tarantino had to choose which would make it into the film. In front of Menke on the desk sat a large electronic control panel with dozens of knobs and switches and color-coded keys. Tarantino sat uncharacteristically still. Zoe slept.
I’m not the boss of the customers. I’m the boss of you. And I’m telling you that I want you to keep that shit-kicker hat at home.
One day in the middle of June, Tarantino and Menke went over a scene in which Bill’s brother, Budd, is fired from his job as a bouncer at the My-Oh-My strip club by the club’s owner, Larry. It was a section of the scene that would last maybe a minute in the finished movie. It took hours.
I always work Saturday. Saturday’s my day.
No more.
The work was monotonous, but Tarantino was riveted. He sat on the edge of his chair, so that his face was a few inches from the screen. He jiggled his leg. He needed to finish a good version of the movie for a Miramax executive screening the following week. Already something had gone wrong and had had to be redone: in a scene spoken in Japanese, someone had inserted for subtitles the literal English translation rather than Tarantino’s rewriting of it.
Saturday’s my day. No more. Saturday. No . . . Saturday.
Larry, the club owner, sat in a small seedy office with absurd red wallpaper, snorting coke with one of his strippers; Budd stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, wearing a white cowboy hat and a gold chain around his neck. They both spoke very, very slowly, like cowboys in a Western.
“O.K., stop it right there,” Tarantino said, pulling his chair even closer to the screen. “Let’s look at 75 A-3 for that part when he turns back to Michael.” Michael was Michael Madsen, who plays Budd. Tarantino watched closely.
Until you hear from me. You got that? Can you remember that? Till you hear from me.
“I like that part,” Tarantino said, sitting back again. “I like that he has his hands right there in his crotch and everything.” Zoe got up from her dog bed, wandered into the next room, came back, stretched, and collapsed onto the bed again.
That hat. How many times have I told you about wearing that hat in here? How many times?
“Did you have a favorite?” Tarantino asked.
“I kind of liked four the best, because it’s him real spacey.”
“Well, five seems like the spaciest one.”
Five was spacier, but four was cleaner.
That hat. That fu-cking hat. How many times have I told you not to wear that fucking hat in here?
“Let’s put five in and see if we can live with five, all right?” Tarantino said. “Because it’s like when he first starts we don’t even know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t even know—he’s zeroing in on it.”
Cash is the only thing you kids seem to understand.
The hat. That fucking hat. That fucking hat.
“O.K., let’s look at some of these takes of him taking off his hat and see which one we like the best.”
“O.K. Here’s two.”
Keep your hat at home.
Madsen looked down sadly at the floor, slowly took off his hat, and slunk out of the office. Tarantino giggled.
“O.K., three.”
That shit-kicker hat at home.
Madsen looked down at the floor, took off his hat, and mussed his hair.
“O.K., four?”
Hat at home.
Madsen whipped off his hat, turned around, and left the office with dignity.
“Do you have a preference?” Tarantino asked.
“This one makes Michael sadder; the other one is more efficient,” Menke said.
“I like the sadder one,” Tarantino said, looking affectionately at Michael Madsen’s morose face frozen on the screen. “Yeah, let’s use two.”
“Kill Bill” is, in terms of Tarantino’s genres, an action movie and a chick revenge movie. At the beginning of the story, a pregnant bride, played by Uma Thurman, is shot in the head and left for dead on her wedding day, along with her groom and all their guests. She wakes up out of a coma four years later determined to kill the people who did it: the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which she was once a member, headed by her ex-boss and ex-lover, Bill. The fact that “Kill Bill” is immediately recognizable as a Tarantino movie is interesting, because it has very little dialogue. Its wit is almost entirely visual: fake, glittery snow begging for bloodstains, an absurd B-movie rainstorm, a dazzling Japanese-style animated sequence, and headless bodies everywhere spouting geysers of blood of three different shades of red (though possibly only Tarantino can tell the difference)—Japanese animé blood, Hong Kong kung-fu blood, and American exploitation-movie blood.
“Kill Bill” is both more and less violent than Tarantino’s other movies: more in the number of bodies, quantity of blood, and sound effects (the movie’s blood makes just about every sound that liquid is capable of—dripping, running, gurgling, gushing, bubbling); less in the sense that the violence is stylized and funny, hewing to the Asian-fight-film Shaw Brothers conventions to which it is an homage. Because of the violence, Tarantino has made two different versions of “Kill Bill,” one for America and Europe, one for Asia. (Tarantino does not consider himself an American filmmaker. “America is just another country for me,” he says.) In the Asian version, the violence will be slightly more visible, more exaggerated. He knows now, from bitter experience, that if he indulges in flamboyant, over-the-top violence, American audiences and critics will talk about that more than about almost anything else: it will be taken seriously, as a ponderous moral issue. (Indeed, critics have already expressed outrage at the violence of the American version of “Kill Bill.”) In Japan, on the other hand, audiences are used to gorier and more brutal scenes than anything a ratings board would permit in the U.S., and they take violence as he wants them to—as an especially thrilling and intricate form of choreography. (He often says that he considers violent action sequences to serve the same function in a crime movie that dance sequences do in a musical.) In Japanese cinema, he says, “the violence is big and the blood is big and they have major rape scenes and pedophilia’s no problem. I mean, this is the country that developed the comic-book character ‘Rape Man.’ ”
It’s not just in connection with violence that Tarantino thinks about the audience. He loves nineteen-fifties, Douglas Sirk-style melodramas, but he says that he would not make one, because American audiences (unlike Asian audiences) are not now capable of appreciating the genre. They would take it as camp, he thinks, keeping their emotions in check, but for him the whole point of melodrama is to sweep you away. He thought that Todd Haynes’s recent Douglas Sirk tribute, “Far from Heaven,” suffered from this problem. “I thought it was terrific,” he says, “but I didn’t cry. How can you make a tribute to Douglas Sirk where you don’t cry? I understand why Todd did it: he was afraid of getting bad laughs.”
Tarantino hates focus groups as much as the next director, but it makes no sense to him to consider a movie in itself, independent of its effect on an audience. For him, the eyes and the mind of the audience are part of the thing—part of the performance—he is creating. And however actual, individual audience members react, there is such a thing as an aggregate of desires and expectations—a product of all the other movies and TV shows and stories the audience has absorbed, along with more general cultural currents. Pleasure depends, like most things, on history. Tarantino knows the history of movie pleasure better than anybody, he knows what an audience will be expecting and when, and he uses this knowledge to trap and shock. “I like fucking with your emotions, and I like it when it’s done to me,” he says. “That’s my thing. You’re gonna laugh, you’re gonna laugh, you’re gonna laugh, until you’re gonna stop laughing. You’re gonna stop laughing you’re gonna stop laughing you’re gonna stop laughing until boom you’re gonna laugh again. The audience and the director, it’s an S & M relationship, and the audience is the M. It’s exciting! When you go out and have pie afterward, you’ve got some shit to talk about. You went to the movies that night!”
It’s hard to pin down Tarantino’s taste because he likes nearly everything: gangster movies, heist movies, action movies, coming-of-age movies, buddy movies, B-movies, men-on-a-mission movies, grindhouse, sexploitation, blaxploitation, kung fu, silent, New Wave, film noir, animé, animation, sci-fi, Second World War, horror, teen horror, Westerns, spaghetti Westerns, musicals, thirties studio comedies, teen comedies, thrillers, fantasies, epics, and romances. He has an insatiable appetite for cheesiness, and not just of the seventies variety—he even loves cheesy Hollywood movies that were made recently. One of his favorite screenplays—he considers it fine literature—is “The Green Mile,” Frank Darabont’s adaptation of a Stephen King novel about a very large, childlike, retarded black man with supernatural powers who is accused of murder, which includes the following (representative) exchange:
It’s not that Tarantino doesn’t ever see a difference between bad movies and good movies, or between good movies and great movies. But whereas most critics are really interested only in the difference between good movies and great movies, Tarantino finds the other end of the scale equally fascinating. He is interested in the phenomenon of what might be called the good-enough movie: the movie that is basically terrible, but just good enough—its characters just lifelike enough, its plot just intelligible enough—to make you care. “One of the things I think is really kinda cool,” he says, “is you can watch a badly done movie and maybe the two lead actresses are really crappy, or not really crappy, maybe they’re just not that good, all right, but, God damn it, crazily enough you actually get caught up in the story and actually start caring about them and want it all to work out well. I love that.” When Tarantino’s detractors rage, then, about his asserting the influence of revered figures such as Godard and Howard Hawks, as though he were claiming membership in an élite canon, they are missing the point. It was not Tarantino but his fans who anointed him a canonical figure in that sense. Tarantino’s own canon is so vast, so generous—indeed, so very nearly all-inclusive—that to claim membership in it amounts to little more than claiming to have finished a movie. In manner, Tarantino appears to possess the sort of intensely aggressive ego that would lead a person to scorn his competition and his predecessors, but he doesn’t—instead, he appropriates them. By adoring them, he makes them his own.
There are few things Tarantino enjoys more than being part of an audience that is falling in love with an obscure genre movie of dubious virtue. It is for this reason that, every year or year and a half, when he has time, he goes to Austin, Texas, where his friends and fellow-directors Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez live, and puts on a Quentin Tarantino film festival. The festival screens prints from his unbelievably extensive collection, organized by genre, and usually consists of movies that nobody except Tarantino has ever heard of. The 1996 festival, for instance, took place over ten days in August, showed more than thirty movies, and included nights devoted to biker films (“The Savage Seven,” 1968; “Hollywood Man,” 1976; and “The Glory Stompers,” 1968), Chang Cheh kung fu (”Duel of the Iron Fists,” 1971; and “Seven Blows of the Dragon,” 1972), cheerleader movies (“The Swinging Cheerleaders,” 1974; and “Revenge of the Cheerleaders,” 1976), and an all-night horror marathon that ended at five in the morning (“Cry of the Banshee,” 1970; “Twisted Nerve,” 1968; “Don’t Go in the House,” 1980; “The House on Sorority Row,” 1983; “Horror House,” 1969; and “Legend of the Wolf Woman,” 1976). Tarantino also included two children’s matinées, at which he showed “War of the Monsters” and “Mr. Superinvisible.”
The festival was Tarantino’s idea. Soon after he started making serious money, he began collecting prints. At first, he loved just showing them to friends, but then that was no longer enough. He had all these great movies, and he wanted to show them to lots and lots of people. To his satisfaction, the festivals have had an effect. “All of a sudden, everybody’s writing on the Internet, ‘How can I get “Brotherhood of Death?” ’—some blaxploitation movie that I got,” he says. “It’s so exciting to see. It’s also really great for me as an audience member to see what works, what doesn’t, what still knocks ’em out. I’ll show two kung-fu movies from the seventies, and when they’re over the audience is, like, Yeah! God, that’s one of my favorite moments in the movies.”
At the festival, he introduces each movie, and then he sits down to watch it. He even sits through the all-night marathons. Sometimes something in the middle reminds him of a point he forgot to make in his introduction, in which case he’ll yell it out from his seat. One thing he always remembers to say, though, concerns the spirit in which the movies are to be watched. They may not be the world’s best movies, he tells the audience, but they are movies and, as such, are worthy of respect. If there is anyone in the audience who plans to laugh at them in a snooty way rather than laugh with them in an affectionate way, he would rather that that person not be there. Tarantino detests snootiness about genre films, or about any kind of films, for that matter. “I say to the audience, ‘I like all of these movies,’ ” he says. “There might be apologies for this and that, and sometimes you might have to stand on your tippy toes to see what I see in them, and there’s funny and wacky and silly stuff that happens, and it’s O.K. to laugh at that stuff, all right—but don’t laugh at the movie to show how cool you are. Wait till something’s funny and laugh at that. Because I want you to get into it, and if you put up a force field of smugness you never will. Just leave. We’ll give you your money back.”
Given this attitude, one of the oddest features of Tarantino’s reputation, among both his critics and his fans, is that he is held to be, above all things, an ironic director. Somehow, the most joyfully, almost puppyishly loving director in Hollywood has acquired a reputation for being the least. This is due in large part to all the pop-culture references in his films, which have received a bafflingly disproportionate amount of attention, as though his were the first films to make such allusions. The idea seems to be that pop culture and life are different, so if a movie is talking about pop culture it must not be talking about life. What’s more, since the ironic person’s attitude to pop culture is one of enjoyable disdain, then a movie that refers to pop culture must be designed to stimulate that same emotion. (Never mind that in every other form of art reference to the tradition is understood to be a sign of seriousness, and unselfconscious realism to be a sign of lowbrow ignorance.)
This drives Tarantino absolutely insane. “I mean this shit,” he sputters. “I’m serious, all right! Maybe I don’t even understand what irony means, but I really think that it just boils down to the fact that I know I’m making a movie: the fact that I know that I’m inside of a genre, or I’m subverting a genre, or I’m doing an effect for the audience is somehow ironic.” The crucial mistake people make is to assume that because Tarantino is aware of genres he must also be detached from them. But anyone who doubts that Tarantino takes genres seriously should see “From Dusk Till Dawn,” which he wrote and costarred in, and which was directed by Robert Rodriguez. “From Dusk Till Dawn” is a movie that combines Mexican strippers who are actually vampires with a preacher who recovers his faith in God. It adheres rigorously to horror conventions—Tarantino was originally commissioned to write it by a horror-makeup company as a kind of infomercial—and is quite possibly the worst movie ever made.
Many, many people have described Tarantino’s movies as ironic, but probably the one who gets to Tarantino the most is Paul Schrader. Schrader wrote the screenplay for “Taxi Driver,” a film that Tarantino reveres, and over the years Schrader has told interviewers that Tarantino changed cinema—moved it away from what it had been when he and Scorsese made “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull”—and brought audiences with him. Schrader and Scorsese had presented the existential hero, he said; now Tarantino was introducing the ironic hero, and it was not clear to him whether he and Scorsese had a place in this strange new film world. It may be that, for Schrader, Tarantino’s clever dialogue counts against him. The authentic, existential heroes of the late sixties and the seventies—Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” Kit and Holly in “Badlands,” Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy,” or any number of others—are so inarticulate as to be nearly mute (not counting voice-overs), and their inability to express themselves seems to be a sign that they are too aboriginal, too sincere, to be capable of translating their feelings into the currency of the world.
Schrader has said that he admires Tarantino’s movies, but his underlying message is clear. “It couldn’t help but creep in that his shit is authentic and mine’s not, all right, or his shit is deep and I’m glib, all right,” Tarantino says, his voice rising as he works himself up about it. “But I didn’t buy any of what he was saying! I would be, like, what the fuck is an ironic hero? Clarence in ‘True Romance’ is not ironic! He’s in love! To this day I get people asking me, Would you ever do a romantic movie? I have: ‘True Romance.’ And they say no, I mean a really romantic movie. Well, I think that’s a really romantic movie! And they go, O.K., well, one without violence. I go, well that’s not what you said! I’m not getting agitated. I just don’t get it.”
The problem with the irony charge is that pop culture and life are not separable for Tarantino. But pop culture and life are not separable for most people, any more than other sorts of culture are separable from life. People do, of course, have private lives and private memories that have nothing, or nothing consciously, to do with what they see in the cinema. But, after all, as a director, Tarantino is concerned not with individuals but with an audience, and the memories of an audience—those shared by a group of moviegoers—are memories of movies.
The other sort of pop culture that makes frequent appearances in Tarantino’s films is what Tarantino refers to as minutiae. For every monologue he writes about an old movie or TV show, he writes one about European hamburgers or tipping waitresses or eating pork. He likes Nicholson Baker’s novel “The Mezzanine,” and thinks that someday he might want to make a movie like that—a movie that consisted simply of two people taking a long walk and talking about little stuff, the way “The Mezzanine” consists of a person riding one floor up on an escalator and musing about stuff like plastic straws and shoelaces. The love of minutiae, like the love of pop culture, is a form of nostalgia—a junk-food version of Proust’s madeleine. But, unlike madeleine-nostalgia—nostalgia for a lost world, an unrecoverable childhood—minutiae-nostalgia is nostalgia for a world that still exists, for a life you’re still living. It’s a childlike emotion: a love of repetition; the homesick longing for an experience that took place only recently. Junk food and movies, being almost perfectly replicable, both cater to this longing; so it’s no surprise that Tarantino loves junk food—although lately he’s been on a diet—or that he, like a child, sees his favorite movies over and over and over again. (Nor is it a surprise that Tarantino, who is so in love with the past, tends to reject technology. He takes pride in not knowing how to type or use the Internet; he refused to get a cell phone until a short while ago.)
The minutiae thing didn’t start with Tarantino: it started in the summer of 1989, with the release, in August, of Steven Soderbergh’s film “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” and acquired critical momentum with the début, the following May, of “Seinfeld,” the show about nothing. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” began with the voice of Ann, played by Andie MacDowell, talking to her therapist. “Garbage,” MacDowell said. “All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can’t stop thinking about it. I just, I’ve gotten real concerned over what’s going to happen with all the garbage. I mean, we’ve got so much of it. You know, I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually.” It wasn’t the first time, of course, that a character in a movie had spoken in such a startlingly normal, kitchen-table way, but it was surprising to hear that kind of speech so foregrounded, placed not at a slow moment in the middle but right at the beginning of the movie. When Tarantino did the same thing, beginning “Reservoir Dogs” with his infamous, over-discussed monologue about Madonna, minutiae became institutionalized as a routine in nineties movies, as Seinfeld had institutionalized such routines in TV. They had always been a staple of comedy, especially standup, but Tarantino introduced them into genre movies, where they were surprising. It was the “Don Quixote” move: to make comedy by combining a rigidly stylized genre with the humiliating banality of everyday life.
“I think it’s pretty safe to say that directing is a young man’s game. Directors really don’t get better as they get older. I mean, after you’ve done it twice, you’ve got it. I don’t mean it’s easy, but you know what you’re doing. I’ve been studying all these directors’ careers, and, boy, you tell me the one I haven’t thought of and I’ll bow my head. When I was making ‘Pulp Fiction,’ I would have died for the movie, and if I don’t feel that way I don’t want to put my name on it. I almost feel that I owe it to people who like my stuff. I don’t want to burn out, all right? If a guy like me likes my stuff, maybe he saw ‘Reservoir Dogs’ when he was twenty, or maybe he saw ‘Reservoir Dogs’ when he was my age, or maybe this guy I’m talking about isn’t even born yet, all right? Maybe he’s born today and he’s going to catch up with my shit when he gets older. I don’t want him to have to make excuses for the last twenty years of my career, because I’ve championed directors before and you’re always making excuses. That’s my big thing: I’m not going to burn out.”
Tarantino turned forty this year, and he doesn’t want to be making movies in his sixties, so he has twenty years left to work. If he continues to produce at his current rate—four movies in twelve years—he will direct six more movies, making a total of ten. This is not a lot for a major director, but that’s the idea: he doesn’t want to keep producing just for the sake of it. When he first started directing, he made two movies in a hurry because he had them stored up—he was backlogged with material, even after selling his scripts for “True Romance” and “Natural Born Killers.” But after he made “Jackie Brown” he felt it was time to lie fallow for a while. He thought he might want to make a men-on-a-mission Second World War movie, so he read a lot of books on the subject, particularly about black troops, and he wrote a giant screenplay, long enough for three movies, that was a kind of spaghetti Western set in Nazi-occupied France. When he was younger, he wanted to be like Fassbinder, who made nearly forty films in ten years, but now that he knows how hard it is to make even one, he no longer sees the point in being so prolific. Better to restrict your output, keep it good, and live life in the meantime.
In twenty years, when it comes time for him to stop making movies, Tarantino will know what to do. He has already begun to contemplate his retirement. “I’ve started to realize that I’m a frustrated theatre owner,” he says. “I’ll move out of Los Angeles—somewhere where I can live to a hundred, maybe Montana or something, someplace with good air—and buy some little movie theatre. I’ll have all my prints, and I’ll just show them, and that’ll be my thing. I’ll be the crazy old guy in town that has that little movie theatre. That seems like a really cool old-guy life!”
If all goes as planned, then, the thirty years that Tarantino spends as a director will be only an interlude in the hundred years he will spend as a fan. He will make his ten films, and he will be proud of them. But he will know that, in the end, they will be only ten in the sacred archive of tens of thousands of fast, slow, cool, uncool, cheesy, brilliant, funny, startling, thrilling, wonderful movies that exists perhaps nowhere in the world in so beautifully preserved and complete a form as it does in Tarantino’s mind. ♦
