He always knew he’d have a place in film history. He’s arrogant, precious, pretentious, solipsistic and a bit of a genius. Simon Hattenstone meets Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino jives on to the stage of London’s National Film Theatre. His head nods like a hyperactive chicken. He’s walking the walk, waggling that famously big bottom, preparing to talk the talk. He glances up and waves at the crowd, shy, self-conscious, almost cool. He could be flapping at a fly.
Tarantino first packed out the film theatre just after Pulp Fiction. The tickets disappeared in record time. This time round, for the preview of Jackie Brown, they say they went even quicker. Back in 1994, Tarantino was the nipper, the boy wonder. And Tarantino-esque was an incipient adjective embracing hip music like Dick Dale and Stealers Wheel (that had been unhip till rediscovered by Tarantino), hip actors like John Travolta (who had been unhip till rediscovered by Tarantino), talk, talk, talk, and just as much blood.
The high priests of pop culture declared him a post-modernist because he chopped up time and his bloody shoot-outs were mixed with a thirst for the demotic – lots of gabbing about Madonna followed by a hail of bullets, even more gabbing about burgers called Royales followed by another hail of bullets.
“I became an adjective sooner than I thought I was going to be … every third script out there is described as Tarantino- esque,” he said then. Today, Tarantino’s arrogance is undiminished.
He is asked what Elmore Leonard made of the movie. And he tells us that Leonard didn’t just think it was fine, not even mighty fine, not even the best adaptation of his work he’s had the pleasure to see. No, says Tarantino, now lapping up the audience, “he said it was the best script he’d ever read”. He talks quickly, punctuating his sentences with an etiolated variant of “all right” – “ahhrite”. The questions invite him to restate his genius – yes, it was inspired to cast the heroine of blaxploitation movies, Pam Grier; he agrees that if you’re a good enough film-maker a two-hour movie just flies past; sure he knew there was more to him than two movies and it’s great to silence the sceptics. Thank you everyone.
But Tarantino is a controversial film- maker, and he must expect difficult questions. His films have been called amoral splatterfests. In Britain, Reservoir Dogs was not allowed a video certificate for 18 months. His story of two serial killers, which became Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers, was accused of prompting copycat killings. Spike Lee raged against his exploitation of the blaxploitation genre and for colonising the word “nigger”. Even the Tarantinis in the audience must be looking forward to challenging questions.
A black man tells Tarantino that Jackie Brown is a terrific film but, he says, you just can’t get away with all those offensive “nigger” references. We prepare for the heat and dust of debate. Well, says Tarantino, pausing for effect, “well, I do”. His elastic thin lips stretch into the cheesiest of smiles. The audience cheer and join his laughter. A few of us are left burning for Tarantino’s hubris and the young man’s public humiliation. When Tarantino is asked a difficult question he turns into the playground bully, rounding up his gang before delivering the killer put-down.
After the talk, there is a little party. His publicists are worried because Tarantino has a bad cold. They want him in bed with a hot water bottle. There are plenty of names at the party, but Tarantino is yacking away to the kids. He can’t stop. He seems to be talking movies and dreams and did you see that one and wasn’t it just great, and I notice the black guy who was short-changed in the audience.
Next day I turn up for the interview. The publicists are exhausted. You know, they say, we didn’t get away till 2am in the morning. “He just wouldn’t leave.” I ask them what he was doing – getting drunk, being loud, doing movie-star things. “Not at all, a lot of the time he was talking to this guy about the word nigger.” Today’s Tarantino is still a scruffbag but somehow he looks different, more expensive – a chunky gold bracelet, waxed leather coat, top-of-the-range trainers, even the blob of beard looks as if it set him back a bit. He sounds different, too – quieter, less laddish, as if he’s been to a self- improvement class. He drinks water, smokes an elegant cigarillo, tells me he’s an artist.
Have I seen the film? Yes, twice. “Great. Plays even better the second time, doesn’t it?” and he says it so gently I’m not sure if I’ve heard right.
In its purest sense, Jackie Brown is about two middle-aged people – a bail bondsman and an air stewardess – facing up to their under-achievement and loneliness. Many Tarantino addicts are disappointed. They say it is too slow, the dialogue is not snappy enough, the blood not bloody enough. Others, me included, say it is his best film because its story is human, you can weep as the characters’ hopes and loves sail past, just out of reach.
Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs had a flashy brilliance. Technically superb, beautifully acted and great fun to watch, they had iron bullets in their soul. Does he feel Jackie Brown is a more human film? “I don’t think you can get much more human than Reservoir Dogs.” Tarantino is astonishingly defensive. If you paid him myriad compliments but threw in a single criticism he would gnaw away at the one bone of contention. “My characters have a tremendous amount of depth. I think I write very human individuals and that’s why people respond to them, ahhrite, and you know they are all people with wit and pain and decisions to make.” If the films are so human, why have his detractors suggested they are amoral? He rattles his glass and takes a slurp of water. “I get a kick out of that because actually I think my movies have an extremely strong moral centre. It’s there in the screenplay, it’s not even that you have to read between the lines.”
I think he means that the irredeemable villains get blown away really nastily. Despite appearances, there is something very conservative about Tarantino.
But, I suggest, perhaps art doesn’t have to be moral anyway. If a movie or book doesn’t offer easy platitudes, if it disturbs us and forces us into fresh thought, isn’t that enough?
“No, I don’t think art needs a moral focus or a moral conscience. Actually, I take that back, art does need a moral focus, but the moral focus is the truth of itself, that’s the only morality that counts, the truth of the art, the truth of the creator, the truth of the maker, you just can’t lie.” The Creator! The Maker! He is getting more Old Testament by the minute.
Having pooh-poohed the notion that his two previous films are anything less than a hymn to humanity, he does concede that he enjoys the fact that Jackie Brown is dealing with older people and quieter themes. Does his mother like it? “She loves it. It’s her favourite movie of mine. It’s very obviously the product of a single mother.” What does he mean? “Well, Jackie Brown is a strong woman and a strong, older woman. I got my view of women from my mother, by example of her being both my father and my mother and being a working woman and proving herself to be a success and pulling herself up from her own bootstraps. At the end of the day, yes, a father would have been great, but I didn’t really miss it.”
The past few years must have been both wonderful and unnerving for Tarantino. I can think of no other film-maker who has been simultaneously lauded and vilified on such a scale. For every Adrian Noble thanking him “for the revival of Shakesperean cinema”, there has been a voice railing against him as a one-trick pony with a lust for cartoon violence. For every actor saying he “inspires loyalty … everyone laughs, not just the big guys, the crew love him” (Oscar-nominated Robert Forster), a former collaborator has crawled out of the woodwork to suggest Tarantino owes his success to ripping off former friends.
And when he took bit-part roles in bit-part films like Desperado and Destiny Turns on the Radio, the critics said he’d obviously lost it as a director, and as as for his acting, well he could never act.
Tarantino says it’s crazy that people make such assumptions. “When I’ve done six movies, you can start drawing some conclusions. I’ve made three movies and all those movies have been massively different from each other.”
He says the adjective Tarantino-esque is used to mean “people in black suits, violence, cursing or a certain kind of language” and that is an unflattering, demeaning interpretation of what he does. It diminishes his art.
Not only have the media got his movies wrong, says Tarantino, they have also got him wrong. For example, the nerd who came out of nowhere – just not true. When he said he “became an adjective sooner than he expected” he meant it – he did always expect to become one, just as he always figured “I’d have my place in film history.”
And then there is the perception of Tarantino the geek, the man who lives, breathes and shouts movies. Wrong, he says, quite, quite, wrong. “I once described myself as a film geek in an interview, and I had no idea how seriously journalists would take that, a little bit of self- deprecating humour. And all of a sudden they create a Cinderella story. True, I had been four years earlier working in a video store, but a lot of emphasis has been placed on that that has nothing to do with me as an artist.
“I was working at a video store because it was better than working in a burger bar, ahhrite.” The “ahhrites” becomes a tic when he’s excited. “I was already knowledgeable about films before I worked in the video store, ahhrite, that’s how I got the job. So I didn’t like learn my aesthetic from working behind that counter. This whole thing of a guy who doesn’t live, who just loves movies and that’s all he does, that has no correlation with my real life. The film-lover is one of the facets of my personality, one of the heads of my dragon, and that’s a good guy, but that is not who I am,” he says, like the most pretentious nerd in the video store.
What about the other common line on Tarantino? The unmitigated shit who would put his granny through a mangle if there was a decent tracking shot in it? His former friend and collaborator Roger Avary has accused him of stealing his stories. The producer of Natural Born Killers, Jane Hamsher, wrote the fabulously bitchy book Killer Instinct, in which, by the by, Tarantino was accused of being a double- dealing, illiterate lech – a letter was printed as evidence in which the wunderkind complimented Hamsher on her gorgeous “leggs”.
Now this is not an easy question to ask anyone, let alone the hyper-sensitive Tarantino. I’m trying to think of ways to soften the blow, but it comes out wrong. So is it true, Quentin, that you systematically fucked over all your friends to get to the top? The room seems very quiet, like a western bar before the baddie with the shooters bursts through the swing- doors. “Just think about what you’ve just asked me, you’ve just asked me am I a bad person.” But I’m only giving you the opportunity to set things straight, I whimper.
“You’ve just asked me … who has to fucking deal with a question like that in their life, somebody posing to them are you a bad person, did you screw over your friends? I try to be the exact best person I can possibly be. And I have done a lot to help a lot of people and the people I haven’t been able to help, well, it isn’t actually my jo-aaarb, ahhrite, to live other people’s lives for them, ahhrite.
“You know it’s like when I hear Roger Avary talking, the only thing I can do is sing Bob Dylan’s Positively Fourth Street [‘You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend’] and then I feel a lot better.”
Is he political? Well, he says, years ago, he was a militant. “A good majority of my 20s I had a lot of rage in me. I have a lot of rage now, but in my 20s, I acted on that rage. It was two-fold. I felt I was an artist whose voice wasn’t getting expressed.” Second, he says, as an impoverished aspirant film-maker he sank back into the white underclass, “and you know the white underclass is no different from the black underclass”.
Quentin Tarantino is the most arrogant, precious, pretentious, unquestioning, solipsistic, self-deluded man I’ve ever met. So I can’t work out why I almost like him. Maybe it’s because I don’t believe he did shaft his friends.
Maybe it’s because however shallow he is, he is also a bit of a genius. Maybe it’s because he just says what he thinks and he happens to think he’s the greatest.
When I re-listen to my tape and hear him saying “Jackie Brown plays even better second time,” and that he’s not so sure if Tarantino-esque is one better than Wellesian, and how profound his characters are, and how painful it was when he wasn’t recognised as an artist, I want to go back and say, “Quentin you just can’t get away with these things, you really can’t.” I know what he’d say, though. “But I do … I do.” And he’d be right.