Writer/director Quentin Tarantino never went to film school, never even finished high school. That may be why Reservoir Dogs and True Romance were so much fun. Of course, they were also violent enough to make Janet Reno's hair curl. Now come Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers.
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The other night, while watching the stultifying post-collegiate comedy/drama Reality Bites, I kept having these inspirational visions in which Reality's scenes of whining twentysomethings were invaded by Quentin Tarantino's quirky killers. Winona Ryder's aspiring filmmaker, sucking on a 7-Eleven Big Gulp and complaining about the sluggish job market, is blown away by Reservoir Dogs' Mr. Pink. Ethan Hawke's insufferably smug grunge rocker, doing a ruinous cover of a Violent Femmes song, is shot in the head by True Romance mobster Vincenzo Coccotti ("I haven't killed a slacker since Lollapalooza '92").
Alas, none of this happens in Reality Bites. Everyone lives. In Quentin Tarantino's ultra-violent crime stories, almost everyone dies. And they do not, as the poet said, go gently. Usually they have to be shot. Their blood doesn't spill so much as it gushes, spurts, splatters, soaks and coats. Sometimes it takes the stragglers an excruciatingly long time to die, but in the end, they get there too. And the really twisted part: Tarantino's movies are hilarious.
At 31, Tarantino is technically a member of the so-called Generation X; in reality, he's a one-man argument that Generation X doesn't exist. The shared habit of pop culture references does not a generation make. Tarantino lifts from the '70s like a lot of other people who grew up in that decade, but he makes his homages from deep inside his own time and place.
I saw Reservoir Dogs at an early screening in 1992, as word was just beginning to filter back from the film festivals about some demented video store clerk who'd made this sadistic yet brilliant heist flick. The opening scene -- a bunch of hoods in skinny ties and dark jackets sitting around discussing, improbably, the semantic mysteries of Madonna lyrics--had me hooked. And then the infamous, brutal torture scene: a psychopath cutting off a cop's ear. It pissed me off royally because I knew it was meant to piss me off. I had to admit, though, that the psycho talking into the severed ear was a distinct touch.
By the time I saw True Romance in a theater, a year later, Tarantino-mania was growing in Hollywood-- he was the latest "bad boy" filmmaker and people were lining up to work with him. Romance offered yet another notoriously offensive scene, this one verbal: Dennis Hopper proceeds to tell a Sicilian mobster who's about to kill him Sicilians are the descendants of "niggers," explaining, in excruciatingly detail, just how this is so.
It's a long, bravado monologue, the most politically incorrect dialogue heard on-screen in recent or even not so recent memory. The crowd around me, stunned at first, soon began to laugh. The laughter grew because of the sheer ballsiness of the scene, and then people in the audience were laughing at themselves because it was so wrong to laugh at something like this but it was hilarious and they were helpless. That's when I realized something crucial and, to the Janet Renos of this world, no doubt frightening about Tarantino: like Jack the Ripper, this guy loved his work.
Tarantino's production company is called A Band Apart Productions--a riff on Godard's New Wave crime film, A Bande a Part: Translated, that's Band of Outsiders. So why am I looking for Tarantino on the Disney lot, spawning ground for White Fangs and Mighty Ducks? Because Miramax, the former indie company that's releasing Tarantino's new film Pulp Fiction, was bought by Disney last year.
I stroll past shrubbery shaped like Mickey Mouse, take a right on Dopey Drive, enter the Pulp sound stage, and follow booming gunshots to the screening room where the sound mix for Pulp Fiction is being finalized. Surf music fills the air--eerie, primitive electric guitar twangs. Tarantino, holding a blonde Barbie doll in a long black dress, stands behind a huge bank of mixing consoles and computers with his crew. He may be a self-professed "film geek," but he is also a big, brawny, dangerous-looking dude. His hair's wild, his stubble appears to be perpetual rather than intentional, and he wears a Queen Lalifah T-shirt under one of those tough-guy long leather jackets favored by Shaft. If this cat came at me in a bar, I'd jump back.
Tarantino and his crew are playing a word game: you say a title with the word "summer" in it, but replace "summer" with "Tarantino." "Tarantino of '42," someone suggests. "A Tarantino Place." "Tarantino and Smoke." I resist the urge to shout out, "Tarantino of My German Soldier." The director himself announces, definitively, "The Endless Tarantino" and laughs. His laugh is a loud, staccato "ha-ha-ha-ha!" He laughs a lot, it turns out.
A Pulp scene flashes on the screen Tarantino has turned to face: hit men Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta blow away some punks who've ripped off their boss. Tarantino decides it needs something--a gasp from one of the doomed thieves just as Jackson casually turns, mid-interrogation, and shoots the other thief on the couch. Suddenly the same scene is running backwards--the bullet is sucked out of the body back into the gun. Then Tarantino walks to the boom mike to do the overdub himself. Watching the action on-screen, he gasps on cue. Then he announces, "I want to do it again. That was too ... breathy." This whole process is absurdly unnecessary--the gunshot is so loud and unexpected that audiences will be doing their own gasping at that exact moment. But Tarantino does it again, and then it's time for lunch.
The only person in Hollywood who might possibly talk faster than Quentin Tarantino is Martin Scorsese. It could have something to do with the endless cups of coffee Tarantino consumes. During lunch at Bob's Big Boy, he's up to at least five before I start counting. He is telling me how he's bigger in Europe than in America, "like David Hasselhoff," and so, inevitably, we segue to his new favorite TV show--"Baywatch." "It's like, such a great show," he says. "I've been lamenting the fact that exploitation movies don't exist anymore, but they do--they're just on television. 'Baywatch' is as good as any Crown International movie, but without the nipples. You get all the breasts, you just don't get the nipples--you can actually see the nipples piercing through--you just don't get to see that little red dot. I've fallen in love with that show. I really want David Hasselhoff to move to the big screen."
"You could do that," I suggest. "You have the power."
"Well, I've been thinking about it," he says. I'll bet he has. After all, this is the guy who cast John Travolta as the star of Pulp Fiction. Naturally, Tarantino has a film geek's justification for this bold move: "I've always been a giant Travolta fan. His performance in [Brian De Palma's] Blow Out is one of my favorites of all time. Why aren't directors taking advantage? He's ripe for the picking. No one was using him the way I wanted to use him."
Here are some of Tarantino's new on-screen uses for John Travolta: He shoots heroin, discourses on foot massage and European fast food, reads Modesty Blaise on the toilet, dances the cha-cha, and kills in cold blood.
"Super Big Boy Combo, ranch dressing," Tarantino tells the waitress, without looking at the menu. "And more coffee, please." (Mr. Pink, in Dogs, wouldn't tip the waitress because she hadn't given him six refills. I wonder if this girl knows the film.)
There are several scenes in Pulp Fiction that could vie for the title of most outrageous, but here's one that has to be in the running: a badass black crime lord named Marcellus gets sodomized Deliverance-style by a couple of perverted hillbillies when he stumbles into their pawnshop. Tarantino explains that he originally wanted to score the scene with "My Sharona," The Knack's 1979 power-pop classic, but he couldn't get the rights. The song turned up instead in Reality Bites--it serves as the musical backdrop for a scene in which recent college graduates bop around a Food Mart with cans of Pringles. "The licensing people had to decide between us and Reality Bites. They ultimately made the good choice," Tarantino says with a laugh. "The song ended up being too comical for Pulp. But it's got a good butt-fucking beat to it." Here the director stands and thrusts his hips back and forth while pumping out the song's baseline: "Da-da-dadadada-da-da-dadada ..." And you know what? He's right.
A Tarantino trademark is to perversely combine comedy and gruesome violence. It keeps the audience off balance--you never know when a funny scene's going to turn a dark corner, or if a murder is leading to a punchline. This happens throughout Pulp. In one scene a bunch of guys attempt, with sitcom incompetence, to clean up a mess they've made before one of their wives gets home-- only these men are gangsters and the mess is a murder victim, his brains and blood spattered, JFK-like, all over a car in the garage.
I figure if Tarantino can explain where this weirdness came from, I'll have some insight into where he's coming from. "Um--I'm not really a hundred percent sure where it came from," he says. "It was sort of like the idea of--the comedy is the reality of it. As opposed to gangsters doing what gangsters do, they're dealing with real-life concerns, which are fucking them up. They're not worried about cops, they're worried about this guy's wife coming home. It's absurd because it seems like real life." Oh yeah, real life. Right. I hate it when I get brains all over the backseat.
Tarantino could serve as the Janet Reno poster boy for movie violence: "Senators, here's that proof I was looking for--this poor bastard watched exploitation films as a child, and look what happened." Tarantino's been fielding questions about the blood in his movies from his earliest interviews and, well, now he has to do it again. He remains unrepentant on the subject. "It's funny because to me, I'm never--the only time I put any thought to the subject," he says a bit wearily, "is when a journalist asks me a question about it. I want to say something interesting and truthful--so I think about it. But in giving an answer I'm giving you the impression that I walk around with this philosophy of violence. I have no more problem with violence in movies than I do with dance or subtitles or slapstick. My mother doesn't like slapstick--that doesn't make her a jerk. It comes down to what some people like and don't like."
Actually, as he knows, it comes down to what some people in Washington want to ban. But Tarantino doesn't have nightmares of censors snipping away at his artfully staged mayhem. "It's just getting inflamed right now. It'll go away after a certain point. My first couple of movies have been in the crime film genre--it's violent. I'm not afraid of showing violence. I think it's very cinematic. I like Godard's quote in Pierrot le Fou: 'There is no blood in Pierrot le Fou. There is only the color red.'"
I ask Tarantino the film nut what his favorite Shootout scenes in other people's movies are, knowing that he's probably got it all worked out. "Well, obviously The Wild Bunch shootout, as well as--it's almost as good--John Milius's big shootout in the last third of Dillinger when the G-men surround Pretty Boy Floyd. He almost manages to accomplish everything Peckinpah did without the slow motion. As far as I'm concerned, John Woo does the best shootouts of anyone, although there are a lot of people in Hong Kong who could give him a run for his money. Woo's A Better Tomorrow Part 2 is probably my favorite shootout of all time. And-- this has to be mentioned--the restaurant shootout in Year of the Dragon. A true masterpiece of filmmaking. It couldn't be better, actually. When an action scene works, you forget that you're watching a movie. You forget you're breathing. Those are great, great moments that cinema can do that few other art forms can."
Movie art is one thing. But Tarantino's gleeful portrayal of graphic violence isn't just aesthetics, or for that matter, sadism. I think he wants to kick the audience's ass by giving them that "real life" he talks about. But how personal is his take on violence? Has he ever experienced violence in his own world? "Yeah," he says, quietly, then pauses. "Just bizarre things from living real life. Real-life violence is bizarre." He looks up at two young boys who are studying us curiously through the window of the restaurant. They start making faces. "Like someone looking at this kid, and suddenly giving him a smack on the face. I'd be shocked."
What about Tarantino's parents? What are they like? "I--I only have a mom," he says in a subdued voice. "My mom is an executive with a home medical organization." Period. More coffee.
"What scares you?" I ask Tarantino. "Well, it's been a long time since I saw anything in the movies that scared me--"
"No," I say, "what scares you in real life?"
"Oh. Well, lots of things. Rats. I have a big rat phobia. I'm serious."
Then he launches into a detailed description of a "Roseanne" episode he just saw, in which Rosie's macho husband Dan backs out of a bar fight at the last minute because, he promised her he wouldn't fight and he really just doesn't want to do it again. Later Roseanne tells him, "Me and the kids civilized you when you wasn't looking." Just as I'm wondering what this has to do with Tarantino's fears, he says, "I used to live and walk around in some of the most fucked up areas you could ever imagine. I went out of my way to go to those areas, you know. I never once gave, like, two thoughts about it. I used to have the biggest balls in the world. I'd see a guy coming towards me, I'd look like a badass and dare him to say something."
"Just how much of a badass were you?" I ask. I know he didn't finish high school, but I'm not sure what that had to do with badass-dom. Tarantino says, "Well, I--I'm not bragging about it. I'm just, you know --I don't know. I just wasn't scared about stuff. I figured I could handle any situation I was in. But oddly enough, I can't even remember the last fight I was in. Since I've been an adult. Now I'm on my guard more, and partly it's because, in a way, I've become a little civilized. Being the baddest guy in the world isn't the most important thing anymore. I think it's that I can feel the repression in the air, and the threat of violence, and it makes me a little sad and scared."
Here's some dialogue cut from the final screen version of True Romance. (Parental discretion is advised):
DREXL: ... I wanna ask you a question. You with some fine bitch, I mean a brick shithouse bitch... you're with Jayne Kennedy and you say, "Bitch, suck my dick." And then Jayne Kennedy says, "First things first nigger, I ain't suckin' shit till you bring your ass over here and lick my bush." Now what do you say?
FLOYD: I tell Jayne Kennedy "Suck my dick or I'll beat your ass."
Here's some dialogue not cut from True Romance. (Discretion still advised): "It's a fact. Sicilians have black blood pumping through their hearts. You see, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the Moors conquered Sicily. And Moors are niggers. They did so much fuckin' with the Sicilian women they changed the bloodline forever from blond hair and blue eyes to black hair and dark skin."
Here are young black filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes on the subject of this crazy white boy: "We love Quentin Tarantino... [but] he's gotta stop using that nigger shit... That [is] straight-up racist."
I tell Tarantino about the Hughes Brothers' comments, and he says he hasn't read that interview, but that such criticism in general "doesn't bother me. That's the way my characters talk--in the movies I've made so far. I also feel that that word 'nigger' is one of the most volatile words in the English language and anytime anyone gives a word that much power, I think everybody should be shouting it from the rooftops to take the power away. I grew up around blacks and have no fear of it. I grew up saying it as an expression.
"One thing that was kinda cool," he continues, "Spike Lee called me to talk to his film class at Harvard. He and I had never spoken. He asked me, 'What's your obsession with blacks? Your films have a big black subtext and culture even when they're about whites.' He said, 'Well yeah, there's all that "nigger" shit in Dogs' but he wasn't being judgmental. He was curious." Tarantino must have reached Spike on a very good day, since I just saw him on "Arsenio," explaining how the use of "nigger" by a rap star was indefensible. Then again, maybe Spike just thinks Tarantino's a crazy white boy.
In True Romance, the hero interrupts his deadly confrontation with the killer pimp to set the record straight on the movie playing on the TV in the background: it's blacksploitation classic The Mack, he saw it seven years ago, and it stars Max Julien and Richard Pryor. That's Tarantino talking--he spent his adolescence in black movie theaters watching kung fu, exploitation and blacksploitation flicks. "I grew up around black culture and love it," he says. "Especially the '70s black culture." You can see it in his own movies: from shootouts to attitudes, plenty of moments that owe as much to hard-core inner city '70s action films like The Mack, Coffy, Superfly et al, as they do to spaghetti westerns or the French New Wave. "One of the coolest perks of fame is that I've been able to track down some of my heroes growing up. I met Pam Grier, and it was so cool. I have all these Pam Grier posters in my office--_The Big Bird Cage_, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba Baby. She came in and goes, 'Did you put all these posters up because you knew I was coming in?' I said, 'No--I almost took them down because you were coming in!'"
Waitress? More coffee over here!
When Tony Scott directed True Romance, he was remarkably faithful to Tarantino's script--except he gave the story of two young lovers on the run a radically upbeat ending and added a fairy tale gloss. Still, Tarantino says that, when it comes down to it, he's satisfied with Scott's movie. It seems unlikely he'll feel that way about Oliver Stone's version of his Natural Born Killers script, which Stone read, purportedly loved, and optioned before Dogs was even made. In the end, he completely rewrote Tarantino's script, and there have been reports that tension has developed between the two because of it.
"I'm pretty mercurial on the subject, all right?" Tarantino says. "Because I didn't want to make the movie and I didn't want anyone else to make it. Everyone in the world is trying to get a movie made. I didn't want a movie made and it got made. Stone took it and completely rewrote the script. I tried to talk him out of doing the movie. I said, 'Why don't you just rip off the ideas that you like?' But he was like, 'I'd never do that.' It was out of my hands--these producers had an option on it, not given to them by me, when Stone got involved. There's still sore wounds about the whole thing. But I'm actually pretty cool about it right now. We worked out the credit situation. I'm going to get just a 'story by' credit. That's what I wanted."
Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Natural Born Killers while working in a video store, and didn't know which one (if any) he'd get to direct first (if ever). Finally, after a few frustrating false starts, he decided to shoot Dogs guerrilla style, using family and friends. Then Harvey Keitel read the script and decided he was holding something hot. The rest is a quintessential Hollywood success story--or at least the first act of one. Plenty of critics and audiences didn't go for the violence of Dogs. The film was not a mainstream hit, but at a cost of $1.5 million, it didn't have to be. Anyway, Tarantino says he's uninterested in the "horse race" mentality that governs how Hollywood measures a film's success. True Romance was a flop (by Hollywood standards) and Natural Born Killers was eviscerated. Which brings us to Act II.
Pulp Fiction is the first pure Tarantino product since Dogs; Shot for less than $10 million, sporting an eclectic cast including Travolta, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Eric Stoltz, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, it is, in Tarantino fashion, a righteously funny, yet definitely grotesque melange of oddball crooks, doomed romantics, great dialogue and crimes against humanity. It's the most original script I've read in a long time --and I have no fucking idea what the world will make of this movie.
"I don't want to be this little art house guy who does a particular kind of picture for a particular audience," says Tarantino. "That's just as much of a talent-strangling road as becoming a hack and doing every picture that comes along. I don't want people saying, 'Oh, it's the new Tarantino movie. It's just like the last Tarantino movie...'"
I wait for him to tell me how he's going to break out of that mold, but he doesn't. So I finish the thought for him: "In which case, you should make something besides violent-crime genre flicks that end in Mexican standoffs." He seems to agree--to a point. He'd like to do a musical, or a kid's film like The Bad News Bears. Sure, why the hell not? The Bad News Bears in Breaking Parole. "Pulp Fiction is very much a getting-it-out-of-your-system film," says Tarantino. "But on the other hand, if I come up with a really great idea and it's a crime film, should I not do it because I've done all these others? I'm not gonna let thoughts like that dictate my life."
Tarantino likes Pauline Kael's image of Godard as a movie-mad Frenchman sitting in a cafe, scribbling down the poetry he discovers between the lines of American hard-boiled fiction and turning it into movies. If any young Hollywood filmmaker is attempting something comparable right now, it's Tarantino. I'll bet dimes to petrodollars that Tarantino's chapter will be longer than Kurt Cobain's. Who, incidentally, had he lived in Tarantino's world, wouldn't have had to blow his own head off. Someone would gladly have done it for him.
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Joshua Mooney interviewed James Cameron for the July Movieline.