Quentin Tarantino and his mother’s advice: “I’m more concerned that you watch the news. A movie won’t hurt you.”

The usual image we have of Quentin Tarantino It is that of the outburst and laughter filmmaker, of the iconoclastic filmmaker who contradicts any convention, who uses the verb “fuck” in all its forms and laughs uproariously at his own jokes. But there is little of that character in the autobiography that we have in hand. Perhaps it was the pandemic that forced the creator of “Pulp Fiction” to withdraw and write, not a new script, but his own memory, told in a language very different from the one we used to hear from him. For someone who lives from, by and for the cinema, writing an autobiography is to recover the films he saw, where and with whom. In the 422-page “Film Meditations” volume published by Reservoir Books, A book that can be read as scattered memories, as a lucid and highly informed set of essays on cinema, and as an amazing journey into his mind.

His work in a video store was the piece of information repeated by all when it came to explaining the filmmaker’s beginnings and explaining his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and his preference for marginal genres. However, this volume offers us a hitherto unpublished image of the artist: a seven-year-old boy, attending the Tiffany cinema, on Hollywood boulevard, with his mother Connie and his stepfather Curt. We are in 1970, and the double bill screens John G. Avildsen’s “Joe, American Citizen”, a film about a murderer of hippies who ends up executing his own daughter, and “Where’s Daddy?”, a thick comedy by Carl Reiner , in which George Segal dons a gorilla costume and is punched in the testicles by Ruth Gordon. A whole ‘delicatessen’ of the American comedy of the time.

Little Tarantino adds his laughter to that of the adults around him. “It was very exciting to be the only kid in a theater packed to the brim with adults, watching a movie and hearing them insult and laugh at something that was sure to be off-color,” he explains. Remembering the scene, the filmmaker makes an analysis that reveals his mastery. He analyzes the context: all those adults had been educated in the 50s and 60s, with very cheesy movies, subject to the strict and conservative Hays code. But then they were seeing a type of humor unprecedented until then, typical of the so-called New Hollywood. They were discovering a cinema that was encouraged to joke with farts and other scatologies, while the Tarantino boy assumed that humor with absolute naturalness. Two very different ways of understanding reception. In their own way, the entire audience shared the same innocence.

“It was so exciting to be the only kid in a theater packed to the brim with adults, watching a movie and hearing them insult and laugh at something that was sure to be off-color”

Not movies to take a kid with, by the way, but instead of leaving him at home with his Grandma Dorothy, both parents let him accompany them to adult movies as long as he kept his mouth shut and didn’t ask silly questions. And little Quint accepted the deal. For him it was fascinating to share the time of adults. “Because I was allowed to see things that other children were not allowed to see, my classmates thought I was sophisticated. They were right, because I was, ”he says. He once asked his mother if it was okay to watch such gruesome movies, to which she replied: “Quentin, I’m more concerned that you watch the news. A movie is not going to hurt you.

But there were also limits for little Tarantino. He recounts: “My mother loved a movie called ‘Melinda’, which starred Calvin Lockhart. I told her that I also wanted to see her, but on that occasion she told me that she couldn’t. He didn’t say that often. The only two movies she said I couldn’t see were “The Exorcist” and “Meat for Frankenstein.” So I asked him why. And I’ve never forgotten the answer she gave me: ‘You see Quentin, she’s very violent. Not that I necessarily reject that, but you wouldn’t understand the argument. And without understanding the context in which violence takes place, you would be seeing violence for violence’s sake. And that’s not what I want.’ Considering that this would be a conversation that I would have for the rest of my life, I have never heard anyone express that idea better than my mother.

After her parents separated, Connie would take her son to accompany her on her dates with different boyfriends, all of them black, some of whom were professional soccer players. The new family that Quentin will meet will be the one that lives in his apartment: his mother, his two colleagues in his job as a waitress, (Jackie and Lilian, African-American and Latino, respectively), and the couples on duty. The double features would continue and the filmmaker says that sometimes he and his mother were the only white people in the room. Although some were especially disturbing, Tarantino confesses that there was only one that he was unable to cope with: “Bambi”, produced by Walt Disney. “Bambi lost when separated from her mother, the hunter shooting her and the horrific forest fire affected me more than any other image I saw in the cinema,” he says. Let’s take note: it is not the death of the mother deer that affects him, since he had seen much more violent things, but the lie of the trailers that offered a much kinder and funnier film. That puzzled him and affected him forever.

Eclectic in his tastes, Tarantino, in the manner of an eternal child in the wrong movie theater, approaches the analysis of those films seen early with deep knowledge and a total lack of complexes. His personal meditations are adding elements to, as the reading progresses, recognize where the references of a good part of his cinema are. They are essays written from the privileged position of someone who has spoken with the protagonists of iconic productions of the seventies such as “Mash”, “The Godfather”, “Dirty Harry”, “Contact in France”, Bullit or “Polvora negra”, a film cult hit in the “Blaxploitation” subgenre, about which he says: “I’ve spent my entire life going to movies and making movies in an effort to recreate the experience of seeing a newly released Jim Brown movie on a Saturday night. , in a cinema with a black audience in 1972″.

The filmmaker brings together his passion for martial arts, gangster movies, the war genre or the spaghetti western, reconciling his fame as a director close to series B, but with absolute respect for the classics. An effort that makes him akin to the only person capable of competing in his erudition and his cinephilia: Martin Scorcese, a filmmaker with whom Tarantino assumes as an equal. Reading Tarantino is the closest thing to conversing with a video store “geek” who offers us a Socratic dialogue. Sometimes, it seems to start from an absurd, funny or playful premise, which seems to lead to nothing, but it will always end in an original and profound reflection.

Tarantino offers us his happy dazzle over the films he saw as a child. There is in the pages of his original thought, a privileged access to the sources, an intention to flee from any homogeneous opinion, without allowing himself any common place. The person in charge of “Once upon a time in Hollywood” builds an autobiography through those films. Announced in local bookstores at the beginning of May, it is a book of pure love for cinema, as a child who has just discovered it can love it. It is clear: the best thing that we have seen or has happened in a dark room, happened in our childhood.

Tarantino’s Commandments

1. Not studying directing. Tarantino has always discouraged young people from enrolling in directing or scriptwriting schools. Rather, he affirms that a true filmmaker must be an actor, whether or not he appears in a film. For him, films and scripts are built from within, in the position of the performer.

2. The secret of movement. Beginning with the opening of “Reservoir Dogs”, in which a delirious gathering is recorded by the circular movement of a camera, for Tarantino a filmmaker begins to master movement when the viewer does not perceive it.

3. The necessary theatricality. The author of “Jackie Brown” recommends that his supporters have the courage to shoot long scenes, that they take advantage of the power of increasing tension and that they bring a certain theatricality to the cinema, with special attention to the dialogues.

4. Music without musicians. No commissioned soundtracks or hired composers. For Tarantino, it is aberrational to give his film to a professional to put music to his scenes. He prefers to choose his songs and ride them in his head. “I want the music of the musicians, but I don’t want them”, he said in one of his ‘master class’ at the Cannes festival.

5. action is everything. Tarantino maintains that action scenes are the litmus test for a filmmaker, the most cinematic aspect of a film and the reason that attracts the viewer.

6. Humor is key. Tarantino sows laughter in places where he least expects it. Sometimes in a bloodbath, others in the solemnity of a funeral. The filmmaker has coined his own style of comedy, a way of laughing and letting go.

7. Cinema as heritage. Tarantino requires his followers to learn film culture, revisit classics, and keep their curiosity awake. He recognizes Martin Scorcese, Brian de Palma and Howard Huges as teachers.

8. The call of the blood. Tarantino needs liters of her to paint his movies and transcend reality. An attraction that is born in the closeness that the director feels for the ‘gore’ films of the Italian Dario Argento.