Attend the presentation at the Coliseum theater in Barcelona on April 9 of the book cinema meditationswith the presence of its author, the director Quentin Tarantino, costs between 82.5 and 94 euros, which is about ten percent of the minimum interprofessional salary. This event will probably be sold out, despite not promising fireworks or a Show of lights live, but only the rigorous live confessions of one of the most popular and admired film directors, and also one of the most moviegoers.
However, there are other cheaper and more accessible ways to access Tarantino’s mind. One, The Video Archive Podcast, the podcast he shares with fellow writer-director Roger Avary (co-author of pulp fiction) in which they talk about the movies that made them movie lovers. another, the cinema meditations that just published in Spain the Reservoir Books publishing house, with which one can satisfy the curiosity in its more than 390 pages about the film buff beginnings of the director of reservoir dogsknow some industry gossip and all the more or less scathing opinions of the filmmaker as well as access the memories of his childhood and adolescence.
At eight or nine years old, Tarantino (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1963) he went to the movies with his parents, but they didn’t necessarily see movies suitable for all audiences, but adult films – those that other parents did not let their children see in any way. “Quentin, I’m more concerned that you watch the news. A movie isn’t going to hurt you,” her mother replied when she asked about this matter. This is how the director felt privileged and was considered a “sophisticated person” among his classmates.
Quentin, I’m more concerned with you watching the news. A movie is not going to hurt you, “her mother told Tarantino
The “insane violent images” that the filmmaker saw between 1970 and 1972 “would horrify most readers,” by the author’s own admission. Among them, he remembers a disturbing image of the scream of the ghostby Vincent Price, or the “excellent” The residencefrom the Spanish Chicho Ibáñez Serrador. But all those titles with grotesque moments did not concern her mother, who trusted Quentin’s ability to deal with the images because she “understood the plot”.
One of the most incredible moments in this book is Tarantino’s confession of The movie of the time that was impossible to cope with: Bambi. “Nothing prepared me for the heartbreaking turn of events,” says the director, who recalls the way in which the advertisements hid the “true nature” of this film, one of the most famous titles, no more and no less, than Disney. The boy who saw all the horror titles that passed through the cinema had been shocked by a cartoon tragedy.
At the age of 14, Tarantino saw his first two porn movies at the cinema, in a double session at the Pussy Theater on Hollywood Boulevard: deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. At 16, before working in a video store, he got a job as an usher in that same cinema, which he had gone to two years earlier at 2:00 in the morning so that they would not prevent him from entering.
By then, the director had already experienced the most intense moment of his life in a movie theater, which he has insisted on recreating ever since. black powder, by Jim Brown, caused such an uproar among the audience that a little nine-year-old Tarantino couldn’t help but join in the excitement. “It was possibly the most masculine experience I’d ever been a part of,” he recalls.
Tarantino and the film critic
bullit, Dirty Harry -“the most imitated action film in the following two decades”-, The escapethe criminal organization taxi driver -and their hypotheses about what the film would have been like in the hands of Brian de Palmaor the eternal question about whether it is a racist film or one starring a racist-; escape from alcatraz either the house of horrors These are some of the films that Tarantino reflects on in the chapters of this book, in which he takes the opportunity to address other issues, such as who was behind Steve McQueen’s choices or the role of film critics.
“As a guy who loved movies and paid to see almost anything, I saw them as just insidious assholes,” Tarantino says of criticism in the 1970s.
“Most of the critics who wrote for newspapers and magazines ranked above the films they were paid to review. Something that I could never understand, because, judging by his texts, obviously they were not superior “, affirms the director regarding the criticism in the press about the criminal organization (1973). “As a guy who loved movies and paid to see almost anything, I saw them as just insidious assholes,” writes Tarantino, who now blames those texts on his unhappiness.
“They wrote with the attitude of someone who hates their life, or at least someone who hates their job,” he says. His meeting points and his discrepancies with the profession focus on the work of Kevin Thomas, of whom he does not hesitate to include some of his favorite reviews.
Tarantino and Almodovar
What about your relationship with Spain? To the mentioned title of Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, is added in these cinema meditations the words that he dedicates to the work of Pedro Almodóvar. Tarantino talks about the “terrifying homogenization” of the films that were made in Hollywood in the 80s, far from the productions of the 70s with which he had grown up and in which “anything went”. In this need to “play safe”, due to which “self-censorship” reigned, the director of pulp fiction He sees it as “inconceivable” that a studio would have an opening scene like that of Matador, by Pedro Almodóvar, with a person who masturbates before one of the bloodiest movies in cinema.
The infantilization of Hollywood in the 80s, as he points out, was far from his desire for cinema as a creator. “While I watched my heroes, the mavericks of 1970s American cinema, capitulate to a new way of working just to keep their jobs, Pedro’s temerity ridiculed the calculated concessions of all of them”, he points out in these pages, in which he criticizes a return to the “restraint of the 50s”.
