Few directors have achieved such initial acclaim and few have received such subsequent critical maulings. Now, with his new film about to open at Cannes, the director of Pulp Fiction has never had greater need of a winner, writes Ryan Gilbey
When Quentin Tarantino climbs the steps of the Grand Palais on Wednesday for the world premiere of his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival, he may feel like he is coming home.
It was in Cannes 15 years ago that he received the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction. Even
those among us who believe it to be a film of moments, as opposed to a momentous film, will concede that it had a seismic effect on what followed. Its zesty, profane dialogue retuned the ears of cinema audiences much as David Mamet had done for 1980s theatregoers; it introduced the possibility, more or less absent since Godard, that violence could be flip and funny; and it altered forever our definitions of independent and mainstream cinema.
This year, Tarantino is back in Cannes with Inglourious Basterds, not merely a title destined to have "sic" printed after it wherever it is mentioned, but a spaghetti western draped in a World War II greatcoat.
Brad Pitt plays Lt Aldo Raine, leader of a ruthless squad of Jewish-American soldiers dedicated to killing, maiming and torturing as many Nazis as they can get their bloodthirsty mitts on. The gore-spattered trailer promises everything from a swastika being carved into a Nazi officer's forehead to a man's head being pulped with a baseball bat.
A lot has changed since Pulp Fiction. The former enfant terrible has just turned 46; the films on which his reputation is founded are some distance behind him. Those who marvelled at the assurance and aplomb of Tarantino's 1992 debut, the slippery heist thriller Reservoir Dogs, or the unexpected warmth and wisdom of 1997's Jackie Brown may then be wary of Inglourious Basterds, with its early signs that the director is wading even further into the B-movie hinterlands of his most recent work. But then his career has always been very much a tale of two Tarantinos.
On one hand, there is the over-excitable movie buff who makes films the way he talks - manic and magpie-like, grabbing at influences and touchstones. This is the Tarantino abundantly in evidence throughout much of the two-part martial arts revenge thriller Kill Bill and the entirety of the trashy B-movie homage Death Proof. These are movies which have no frame of reference outside other movies; they exist in a cinematic hall of mirrors, where nothing resembling emotional authenticity can hope to find purchase.
And yet it is precisely Tarantino's movie-geek personality that has made him a uniquely democratic celebrity. Pop-cultural fame for a director is almost unheard of outside special cases such as Spielberg, Scorsese and Lucas. But Tarantino has that sewn up while still giving the impression of being on an equal footing with his audience.
His boyhood enthusiasm for movies is undimmed by the part he now plays in making them. You can see what a whiz this Californian chatterbox must have been when he was manning the till at Manhattan Beach's Video Archives shop, recommending obscure titles to anyone who would listen. Is it any wonder his fans still feel they may bump into him at a martial arts film convention or in the queue for a midnight movie?
But some of us are eager now to know what happened to the other Quentin Tarantino, the one who gave US cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart - much like the one administered to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Certainly, the early years of his career were the most dynamic by a long chalk.
Despite a reported IQ of 160, the dyslexic Tarantino dropped out of junior high school in Harbor City, Los Angeles, in ninth grade. His mother raised him and Tarantino was none too impressed years later when his biological father tried to make contact with him. "The only thing I've got to say to him is, 'Thanks for the sperm'. He had 30 years to look me up and he tries after I'm famous? It was sad."
Initially, Tarantino landed the occasional acting gig, most famously a turn as an Elvis impersonator on an episode of the sitcom The Golden Girls. But his earnings at this point were meagre and he found himself banged up on driving offences when he couldn't stretch to the fines. He had also started collaborating on scripts with his Video Archives colleague, Roger Avary. He based True Romance, a lovers-on-the-lam comedy-thriller crammed with movie references, on Avary's screenplay The Open Road.
Avary, in turn, tidied up his friend's spelling and helped him with structure; he came to Tarantino's rescue when he was having difficulty with a scene in Natural Born Killers, and wrote background dialogue for Reservoir Dogs. That script found its way to Harvey Keitel, who signed on as star and executive producer, and was instrumental in getting the film made.
The picture earned Tarantino a reputation for extreme violence when, in fact, he was admirably controlled in what he put before the audience. It is mostly the expectation and aftermath of brutality that we see; the camera even turns away at one point from the torture of a policeman.
In the excitement that accompanied the emergence of this jazzy directorial voice, Tarantino's stock rose at nosebleed-inducing speed. His old scripts (True Romance, Natural Born Killers [NBK]) were dusted off and filmed by more experienced directors; not only were these movies lacklustre (Tarantino walked out of a screening of Oliver Stone's NBK), they felt like stop-gaps before his follow-up proper.
The weight of expectation resting on Pulp Fiction was immense, and even the ease with which it surpassed hopes - raking in US$250 million worldwide and cleaning up at awards ceremonies - hardly indicated what was in store for Tarantino. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time since Scorsese, a director was enjoying rock star-like status.
"When I started going on the film festival circuit," he has said, "I was getting laid all the time. I'd never been out of the country before and not only was I getting laid, I was getting laid by foreign chicks ... I felt like Elvis when I was meeting girls."
But he also found himself caught up in some very public spats. Spike Lee railed against Tarantino for the abundance of the word "nigger" in Pulp Fiction: "I'm not against the word, and I use it. But Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made - an honorary black man?"
Tarantino also came to blows in a restaurant with one of the producers of NBK.
Arguably more destructive were his career choices after Pulp Fiction, which suggested a man floundering or hedging his bets. His contribution to Four Rooms was not the worst part of that portmanteau project, but neither was it worthy of a director of his calibre. His acting jobs were similarly unedifying; a supposedly improvised turn in Sleep With Me, in which he delivered a monologue on the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun, nearly cost him his friendship with Avary, who had originated the speech and was planning to use it in his own work.
He came back from the brink in 1997 with Jackie Brown, adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. This tribute to the blaxploitation era is his most compassionate work to date, as well as a film that cheerfully violates the Hollywood commandment regarding screen romance: "Thou shalt not show physical attraction beyond the 16-35 age bracket, unless thou playest it for laughs." Tarantino says it is the film to which he feels least attached. "I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm's way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit."
How peculiar that of all his films he feels so divorced from Jackie Brown, with its emotional plausibility and understated melancholy. There is in the brash, unchecked indulgence of Kill Bill and Death Proof the air of a film-maker sorely in need of a judicious editor. When it became apparent that Kill Bill would have to be released as two films instead of one, the producer, Harvey Weinstein, ever grateful for the glory bestowed on his company Miramax by Pulp Fiction, memorably announced: "Miramax is the house Quentin Tarantino built. Because of his stature he has carte blanche."
It's true that the original idea of releasing Death Proof as one half of the three-hour Grindhouse double-bill (alongside Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror) was scrapped when that pairing tanked at the US box office. But it is of small comfort that audiences elsewhere got to see instead the painfully extended two-hour cut of Death Proof by way of compensation.
Perhaps the very act of expecting him to mature and evolve, or to return to the tenor of his early work, is like waiting for Wim Wenders to make a frathouse comedy. Maybe he wanted all along to devote his career to paying homage to hacks and trashmeisters.
Will the chasm continue to widen between the qualities that made Tarantino's first three movies so fascinating and the shameless, sometimes juvenile passions that drive him on? Or perhaps those of us who hailed Tarantino as a cinematic revolutionary will find further support for our case this month in Cannes.
- OBSERVER
LOWDOWN
Who: Quentin Tarantino
Born: 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a nurse, Connie Zastoupil, and an actor, Tony Tarantino. He dropped out of high school in Harbor City, Los Angeles, and amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema working in the Manhattan Beach Video Archives shop alongside future collaborator Roger Avary.
Past films: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) Death Proof (2007).
Latest: Hardboiled World War II actioner Inglourious Basterds, screening at Cannes on Wednesday and due for release here later in the year.
What he says: "I've given nobody the authority over me to say I can't do anything - I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don't ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won't ask permission."
What others say: "The ironic hero of Tarantino is a person who kills somebody, then says, 'So what. Who cares?' Didn't [Jean-Luc] Godard do that, to a certain extent, in his early films? Is that so new?" - Martin Scorsese