Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Pulp Fiction, opened the South African International Film Festival this week. The controversial director spoke to Andrew Pulver in London
WHEN Quentin Tarantino strolled up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to take possession of the Palme d’Or for his second feature, Pulp Fiction, it wasn’t a pretty sight. While critics were attacking the film as “fundamentally flawed”, the audience shouted abuse; and even as Tarantino tragically declared that his films “divided people”, some implied that the fix was in — that jury chairman Clint Eastwood was fatally unimpressed by the main European contender, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Red.
Whatever the behind-the-scenes agonising, Tarantino’s achievement has been staggering: a symbolic victory over an increasingly embattled European art cinema that simultaneously signalled the establishment’s acknowledgment of the extraordinary phenomenon that Tarantino has become.
The line-up of name American actors (Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel) that Tarantino assembled can’t have harmed Pulp Fiction’s cause — “I was never in a movie that was even nominated for anything before,” Willis marvelled. Tarantino traded on his Reservoir Dogs reputation to put together a genre-busting cast list that not only satisfied his revivalist-chic requirements, but was also perfectly tailored to the zipped-up ensemble acting that has become the director’s trademark.
“I love acting,” Tarantino explains during a visit to London. “It’s my only formal study. One of the advantages of being an actor is the simple fact that you understand the acting process. Most directors just don’t understand how an actor does what he does. That’s more often than not the real dilemma the actor faces. When you can talk actor- talk, that’s half the game right there. That’s what makes actors want to work with me, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest of — when I think about Pulp Fiction, I’ve got some of the best actors in the business. There’s not a weak link. They’re just all fantastic.”
He continues: “Pulp is a much more ambitious work than Dogs. Dogs is a terrific small movie, but Pulp was designed to be an epic in every way, shape and form — in look and style and intention. And I think it is.
“I guess the two jumping-off points were spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation movies. That’s why I have all that surf music in the score. To me surf music always sounds like Ennio Morricone. That pretty much describes Pulp Fiction: it’s a rock’n’roll spaghetti western. I’ve always loved blaxploitation, and Pulp shows that the two can happily co-exist, which fits in with my two biggest influences when I was younger: European art films, and exploitation films. I think my films are holding hands with both.”
Although Tarantino’s output is tiny compared with its impact — two features, two scripts bought and made by big-studio directors (True Romance and Natural Born Killers), an executive producer’s credit on Killing Zo’, written and directed by his pal Roger Avary — he remains the exemplar of a new-generation filmmaker: the movie junkie who’s watched one late-night double-bill too many.
Tarantino has played the fanboy card with considerable aplomb — forcing a revolution in the programming habits of moribund repertory cinema circuits through incessant paeans to Hong Kong heroic bloodshed movies, Pam Grier, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. The list goes on, apparently forever.
There’s undoubtedly more to Tarantino’s movie- making than simply crafty genre-manipulation. The 31-year-old is one of a clutch of directors — the aforementioned Linklater and Avary, Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), Allison Anders — with whom he shares a just-do-it spirit and precocious achievement. With a path broken for them by the wave of American independents of the early 1980s — Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Hal Hartley and the like – – who penetrated the major studios’ stranglehold on the United States distribution system, the new kids can jack themselves onto the big-budget bandwagon with only a single calling-card movie to their name.
Pulp Fiction is, however, already the most celebrated product of this Class of the Nineties. Hardcore Tarantino fans will be able to thrill their way through the lexicon of allusion and reference. There are plenty of examples of Tarantino’s idiosyncratically irrelevant dialogue – – Travolta and Samuel Morgan discuss European junk food while riding to a hit; they talk foot massages standing outside the victims’ door.
“I’m not an active fighter against linear storytelling — I just don’t think it’s the only game in town. I guess where I’m coming from is that I’m very influenced by the way novels work structurally — I’d like to see cinema have the freedom that novelists have had. You can write a novel any way you damn well please; you’re never held accountable. If a novel starts in the middle of the story, you don’t think anything about it. You don’t have to call it a flashback or anything – – it’s just the way they’re telling the story.”
The biggest question of all is: what the hell are Tarantino’s movies about? Jarmusch — in many ways Tarantino’s direct forerunner in his style-heavy investigation of American junk — specialises in alienation: his best movies are about outsiders and their experience of the trashy offcuts of the American dream (Mystery Train even had a ghost-of- Elvis scenario, which found its way into True Romance). Reservoir Dogs is regularly compared to Mean Streets, but there’s little residue of Martin Scorsese’s rage-to-redemption journeys to be found in Tarantino’s work.
It’s within Tarantino’s power to create a body of work that might just completely redefine cinema. “I’m actually very conscious of my films dating,” he concludes. “My movies obviously take place now, but they also seem to take place in a never-never world: the clothes don’t correspond with the cars, that sort of thing. Just because a movie speaks for right now — even if I’m not necessarily out to make it like that — doesn’t mean it’s going to date. I really expect time to be kind with them.”
It’s up to him not to blow it.