Time.news – What happens to you if you grow up in the early 70s going to the cinema brought by your parents to see films considered for adults for the scenes of violence, for the themes of sex, blood, war, homosexuality, etc.? Well, it may happen that when you grow up you become… Quentin Tarantino. ‘Cinema Speculation’ arrives in bookstores from 21 March (La nave di Teseo, I Fari series, transl. Alberto Pezzotta – pp. 464, 20 euro) the ‘almost cine-biography’ of the great American director in which for the first time he recounts his passion for cinema born in 1970 when entered for the first time at the Tiffany Theater in Hollywood where his mother Connie and his stepfather Curt take him to see a double show consisting of ‘Citizen Joe’s War’ by John G. Avildsen and ‘Without Class’ by Carl Reiner. A crazy debut for a seven-year-old boy. Who, says Tarantino, greatly appreciated both films even if he couldn’t help but fall asleep before the end.
From that baptism of fire onwards, little Quentin saw, at an early age, all the films of what he calls la New Hollywood, i.e. films in which the themes prohibited by the Hays Code could now be expressed explicitly (the extremely rigid and bigoted code of self-control had been replaced by the Academy’s ‘ratings’, i.e. the age groups to which the film was aimed who could see minors only if accompanied). “Some of these adult films were crazy – writes the director – ‘MASH’, Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollar Trilogy’, ‘Where Eagles Dare’, ‘The Godfather’, ‘Inspector Callaghan: The Scorpio Case Is Yours!’, ‘The Violent Arm of the Law’, ‘The Owl and the kitten’ and ‘Bullitt’.
Others, for an eight- or nine-year-old, were absurd brown-robusts: ‘Carnal Acquaintance’, ‘The Fox’, ‘Isadora’, ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’, ‘A Call for Inspector Klute’, ‘ Tony’s Girlfriend’, ‘Lost Lover’, ‘Diary of a Troubled Housewife’”. Yet they were films that formed little Quentin making him passionate about cinema and giving him that mental and artistic openness that distinguishes him. Because the mother, a rather restless and very modern woman, went to live with two roommates, one black and one Mexican, taking little Quentin with her.
Furthermore, thanks to his mother’s passion for black men, the boy also discovered a type of cinema that whites generally neither frequented nor loved: the genre definedBlaxploitation‘ (low-budget films aimed at African-Americans with African-American actors and directors and soul or funk music soundtracks). This was followed later by the discovery of the cinema di kung-fu. All films often considered B-series that contributed to Tarantino’s culture and taste (later, discover the Italian comedy with actresses that the director considers real icons such as Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet)
From his mother, little Quentin also learned a great lesson which he then made his own and on which he bases all of his cinema, namely the importance of the screenplay, of the fact that the film tells a story.
When little Quentin told him she wouldn’t take him to see ‘Melinda’ with Calvin Lockhart, he asked his mother why (the only other two films he was denied were ‘The exorcist’ and ‘The monster is on the table… Baron Frankenstein’) and she replied: “It is a very violent film. Not that it’s necessarily a problem for me, but you wouldn’t understand the story. And not understanding history, you would be watching violence just for the sake of violence. And I don’t want that to happen.”
“Considering that I would have heard this speech all my life, I have never heard it expressed with such clarity – comments Tarantino – of course, it’s not that I understood much of a confused plot like that of the ‘violent arm of the law’, except that of the policemen they wanted to frame a bearded Frenchman. But in my mother’s eyes it was enough.” Then she adds, remembering her mother explaining that she wasn’t worried about taking him to see adult films (“Quentin, she worries me more if you watch the news. A movie can’t hurt you”): “Did some images I was exposed to disturb me? Of course yes! But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the movie. ‘Inspector Callaghan: The Scorpio case is yours!’, when the slain girl’s naked corpse is dug out of the hole, damn it was disturbing! But I understood what was behind it,” she adds.
Curiously, Tarantino later confesses that despite the many violent films, some even horror films that he saw as a child, the film capable of upsetting him was… ‘Bambi’ by Walt Disney. “Bambi Lost, Mother Killed by Hunter, and Forest Burns shocked me more than anything I’d seen in the cinema. Only Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House on the Left’, which I saw in 1974, came close,” he reveals.
In the book the director twice awarded Oscars for screenplay for ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Django Unchained’ he talks about the films he loved and saw for the first time when he was very young, the great directors he drank from and the great actors he admired. And it is a sort of declaration of love to the cinema of the 70s, from that of New Hollywood in which anti-hippie filmmakers such as Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, Arthur Penn, then unwittingly gave way to those of ‘Movie Brats’ became the true masters of Hollywood from the late 70s onwards (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese De Palma).
In summary Tarantino explains: “With the counterculture of the sixties, the explosion of youth movements, the emergence of a pop music different from the past, the excitement created by films like ‘Gangster Story’ and ‘The Graduate’, and above all the surprise success of Dennis Hopper’s ‘Easy Rider’, an adult-oriented Hollywood appeared on the scene. A New Hollywood. A Hollywood with a sensibility forged from the 60s and that was declaring war on the system”. And this Hollywood lasted a decade because then the ‘Movie Brats’ arrived, the “new generation (which) did not aspire, like their predecessors, to bring great literature to the screen” because “they were attracted more by novels aimed at the great public, from which they thought they would make good films: as happened with ‘Jaws’, ‘The Godfather’, ‘The Last Show’, ‘Paper Moon’”.
And so, in the sentence in which Tarantino sums up the author and critic, he explains: “At a certain point, it was the Movie Brats who were in tune with the times, unlike the anti-system authors who had started the New Hollywood in which young people now thrived. The hippie directors didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, that there were people who liked movies about giant ants and took Assault on Earth seriously.”
His declaration of love is then enriched by a lot of cinematographic culture, combined with passion and personal taste. So in addition to telling cinematic stories, he also enjoys imagining – as he did in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and ‘Once upon a time… in Hollywood’ – a different story, even imagining how films would have become cult if other directors or actors had cars (as for ‘Taxi Driver’ directed by Martin Scorsese after Brian De Palma’s refusal and the choice to take Robert De Niro as the protagonist and not Jeff Bridges as the production wanted).
In ‘Cinema Speculation’ Tarantino does what he does best: teaches cinema. He does it by telling the events of films or actors of great depth, such as Steve McQueen, or films he loved – or simply admires as a cinephile and genius – especially such as ‘Bullitt‘ , ‘Inspector Callaghan: The Scorpio Case is Yours!’, ‘A Quiet Weekend of Fear’, ‘Getaway!’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Rolling Thunder’, ‘Taverna Paradiso’, ‘Escape from Alcatraz’, ‘Hardcore ‘, ‘The Tunnel of Horrors’. A very enjoyable book, full (very rich) of quotes from films and characters and a lot of cinema. A book that somehow anticipates what should be – the conditional is a must – his tenth and last film (at least that’s what he said), a story in the world of cinema in the 70s.
Quentin Tarantino will be in Milan on Friday 7 April (Mondadori Duomo bookshop, 6 pm) for a special event of the XXIV edition of the Milanesiana, conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, where she will present the new book in conversation with Antonio Monda and meet readers.