Neither the fact that it was Holy Sunday nor the high price of the tickets, 89 euros the most expensive. Tarantino it’s tarantinoand the Barcelona Theater Coliseum it was practically completely filled to receive the director of ‘Inglourious Basterds’. On stage, a low table, two chairs (one for the filmmaker, the other for the host of the talk, Jordi Costa) and a glass of red wine (for Quentin). Seventies music to liven up the wait and to the sound of ‘The Passenger’, the song by Iggy Pop, Tarantino entered the scene. like a rock star. He had not yet opened his mouth and the people were on their feet applauding him wildly.
Tarantino and his ‘cinema speculation‘, original book title’cinema meditations‘, on which the conversation turned. Divided into two parts, a pleasant chat and the reading of one of the chapterswithout a discussion at the end and with a projection of some scenes from ‘American graffiti’ and ‘Dirty Harry’, two of the films of the New Hollywood of the 70s that the book is about. Tarantino has found a new hobby, that of a film critic or essayist. He announced that he will write a new book about 80’s Hollywood and a third in which he will talk about movies from other countries.
“Thank you for spending Easter Sunday with me,” he began to win over the audience, if someone hadn’t already been won over. “When I started writing this book, the idea was to talk about New Hollywood movies, but I realized that I had to talk about me watching these movies when I was 10 years old.” essay and autobiography at the same time, very well written and very well explained live.
Tarantino has always been didactic. “After World War II, the cinematographies of other countries thought of a more adult audience. This did not happen in Hollywood. The average American had not been exposed to war in the same way. The movies were like Broadway musicals, extravagant, with big budgets. The cinema was still something familiar”.
Time passed, and the relief began to be glimpsed. “The counterculture became the dominant culture”, wielded the filmmaker-writer, with titles such as ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, ‘The graduate’, ‘In the heat of the night’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen’. “But like all revolutions, when you win you have to govern.” And American movies have grown up.
A restrained Tarantino, although he sometimes thunderously hit the microphone and laughed at some comment by Costa, began to recount personal experiences from when he went to the movies as a child. One of the films that marked him was ‘Deliverance’, by John Boorman. “I didn’t know then what sodomy was and I didn’t perceive the scene in this film in which a character gets fucked in the ass as something bad. I was nine years old”. Tarantino is the son of a specific era, and it was not surprising that he assured that “the movie that traumatized me the most was ‘Bambi‘. This film has destroyed many children.”
Her mother and an ex-boyfriend of her best friend’s, named Floyd, appeared several times at the evening. Separated from her stepfather, her mother lived with two friends, one Mexican and one African-American, with little Quentin. She dated a lot of black men and liked athletes, Tarantino recalled, and thus she saw her first films of Jim Brown, one of the athletic heroes of cinema.blaxploitation‘. He explained in a very graphic way the experience of being in a Los Angeles room full of black spectators. He was the only white. It was brought by Floyd, his mentor. Samuel L. Jackson’s character in ‘Jackie Brown’ is inspired by him.
He did not leave out Spanish cinema. He is a big fan of ‘The residence’ and ‘A summer to kill’and “in my podcast” Video Archives used the soundtrack of the latter and considered that its director, Antonio Isasi, is the Spanish Don Siegel”. He also assured that ‘The bloody bride’ by Vicente Aranda is the best adaptation of the novel “Carmilla” and it screamed out loud ‘Vampyros lesbos‘ in tribute to its director, Jesus Franco.