« JI didn’t know that newspapers mastered the art of speculation as well as I do! laughs Quentin Tarantino. The cult filmmaker, never short of puns, of course alludes to the title of the book he came to present this Wednesday evening on the stage of the Grand Rex, in Paris. Cinema Speculations. “You have to believe that the press was better than me on this one. »
After a two-hour conversation and reading about his childhood spent in Los Angeles cinemas with Connie and Kurt, his mother and stepfather, about the cultural revolution that New Hollywood represented in the 1970, and his favorite filmmakers, the director of Pulp Fiction finally put an end to the unbearable suspense and reassured his fans who had come in large numbers to attend the maestro’s master class. “Yes, that’s it, I’ve finished the script for what will be my tenth and last film. I’ll probably shoot it in the fall. All I can tell you is that it will be called The Movie Critic and that, no, it will not be a Pauline Kael biopic [grande critique du New Yorker décédée en 2001, NDLR] as announced a few days ago. Attention, I have a huge admiration for Pauline Kael and I have no doubt that a film about her could be brilliant, but that’s not what I’m preparing. »
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No tweets, photos or videos will be published at this time, despite the impatience of the 2,800 fans stamping their feet in the room. Deposit requires, the evening is phone free. Mean by this that the laptops are put in airplane mode at the entrance to the cinema and neutralized in a locked pocket until the end of the evening. Everyone is therefore asked to take their place wisely, holding their sealed telephone in their hands. Behind the sympathetic argument of rediscovered conviviality, we can clearly see the director’s fear of seeing his words escape him on the Web.
A few hours before going on stage, during an interview granted to the Point, he exults: “What is it like to cut yourself off for a few hours from the world? It’s incredible, but I think it has become an experience in itself! We come out transformed, you’ll see. “Transformed, perhaps not, but one thing is certain, the generalized cut monopolizes all the conversations. While some have to go downstairs to have their wallet opened because their ticket is saved in their phone, others realize that they can’t afford popcorn because they have no other way to settle that a mobile now unusable.
“Long live the cinema! »
We no longer know what time it is. Here and there, anxiety rises – how long does the show last? For Tarantino, the evening could not start under better auspices. In the room, the public religiously browses the celebrated book as if it were the Bible and nothing – not even the machine-gun delivery of the filmmaker who intervenes in English without subtitles – seems to disturb the faithful who have come to attend the great – cinema mass.
“Long live the cinema”, proclaims the guru, before answering questions from the director general of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux. Then, it’s about Little Q, the kid not very good in class who had decided that all adults were movie genius, extraordinary beings who knew everything about the actors, their roles, the shootings. From this education in dark rooms in front of films, sometimes violent, that other children were not allowed to watch. “When I asked my mother why she let me see these films, Tarantino confides, she replied: “Quentin, I worry more about you when you watch the news. A movie can’t hurt!” »
Then, the director improvises himself as a film historian, going from the small to the big story. How did the new Hollywood revolutionize cinema in the 1970s, before giving way to entertainment cinema and “happy endings”? To answer this question which was also the salt of his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he obviously invokes his personal pantheon – Francis Ford Coppola, George Roy Hill, and of course Brian de Palma – and dissects the emotions that these hundreds of films discovered at the Tiffany Theater gave him at the time. “Which of your films are you going to show your children first?” asks Frémaux. Which cinephile father are you? ” Response from the filmmaker: “It may be up to my wife, who is present in the room, to answer you! I think I’ll let them choose, but if I put myself in my son’s shoes and imagine what the tastes of an 8, 10 year old kid might be, I would still say Kill Bill. But this is only speculation…”