Quentin Tarantino: 'This is my time'

Quentin Tarantino is on a roll. Although his most recent film Inglourious Basterds opened to mixed reviews last summer, it has since gone on to become the highest-grossing of his career.

The film also picked up a phenomenal eight Oscar nominations — including best picture, best director and best original screenplay — only one shy of frontrunners Avatar and The Hurt Locker. If the two favourites split the vote, Tarantino might, just might, sneak through the middle and make off with the silverware.

Ahead of the nominations, on his visit to London, I asked Tarantino how he feels about the fact that a full 15 years have elapsed since he won his first screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction. In that period, barring an unsuccessful supporting actor nomination for Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, the Academy has snubbed every film he has made. Not a man known for his even temperament, it's a surprise when he shrugs calmly and says: "I am simply very proud that Inglourious Basterds has been so well received."

Highlights from last year's awards

Such a surprise is it, in fact, that for a moment I'm not sure how to respond. And in that moment, Tarantino starts to lose his cool. "It's like this," he says, sitting forward abruptly, laying his hands palms-down on the wooden table between us in the private dining room of a Soho hotel. "I was always talked about for my first two films [Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction] like I was some sort of flash in the pan. But then I went from flavour of the month, to flavour of the year, to flavour of the decade."

As he speaks, his large fingers prod and jab at the air and his voice, a high-pitched clattering roller-coaster of a thing, gets incrementally louder until he is almost shouting. "Now, at the end of two decades in the business, well maybe I'm not the flavour of anything," he says. "I am here to stay."

Curious mismatch

Dressed in a black shirt, black trousers and floppy black plimsolls, Tarantino is, at 46, a disarmingly emphatic presence. Everything about him feels amplified, exaggerated. In full flow, he is every bit as entertaining as his films; witty, wacky, outrageous. He's also unexpectedly well-built, 1.86 metres tall with a keg of a chest that peeps through a shirt unbuttoned lower than most men would dare.

Tarantino seems invigorated by the success of Inglourious Basterds. He talks about it with an enthusiasm that borders on aggression. The film, an extravagantly entertaining Second World War epic, crackles with the sharp, imaginative writing and febrile violence.

As with all his films, Inglourious Basterds began with what Tarantino describes as "a point of departure from a genre". "I think it's one of the strengths of my movies that I work in genre," he says. "I like making very, very personal movies, buried inside of genre."

His fascination with genres is well known, from the heist movie terrain of Reservoir Dogs to what he calls "the bad-ass chick revenge movie" of Kill Bill, but that word "personal" is unexpected. Although his films are instantly recognisable — his imprint lies in the sassiness of the characters, the pungency of the dialogue, the shrewdness of the soundtracks — they feel united in the manner of products belonging to a carefully controlled brand.

Indeed, the most frequent criticism levelled at Tarantino is that his characters lack humanity; their fates may amuse us, but rarely do they move us. "All my movies are achingly personal," he insists.

"People who really know me can see that in my work. In a film, I may be talking about a bomb in a theatre, but that's not what I'm really talking about." As he says this he laughs an evasive, slightly goading laugh. So, what is he really talking about? "Well, it's not my job to tell you," he says. "My job is to hide it."

He has always written dialogue for imaginary scenes, he says, since he was a child, but it wasn't until he took evening acting classes in the early '90s for which he would write the scripts he performed, that people told him he had a gift for words. "That was the first time anyone had ever complimented me or given me any encouragement about my writing and from that day on I started taking it more seriously."

"As a child, my mum took me to the movies all the time. It was cheaper than getting a babysitter. This was during the '70s, the high time of great challenging movies, so at a very young age I was seeing R-rated stuff like The Wild Bunch and Deliverance. My mum figured that nothing in the movies would ever bother me."

Did growing up in proximity to the home of the film industry help him realise that cinema was something you could do for a living? "LA is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet," he says. "We lived near the airport so it's not as though [Hollywood] felt close to me. I think the only time it feels like that is if your parents are in the business. I knew nobody involved in films."

What about his father? The Internet Movie Database lists Tony Tarantino as the star of a handful of obscure titles. For the first time in our interview, Tarantino pauses before he speaks. "No. Well, I never knew my father," he says. "That's the thing. I never knew him."

Once again, his voice leaps a few decibels as something volatile seems to break the surface. "He wanted to be an actor," he says, drenching the phrase in condescension.

"Now he's an actor only because he has my last name. But he was never part of my life. I didn't know him. I've never met him." Once more he laughs that humourless laugh. Tarantino's success as a filmmaker did not come easily. "Before Reservoir Dogs, everything was constantly a big build up to a huge let down," he says.

"[Venerated US film critic] Pauline Kael used to say that Hollywood is the only town where people ‘can die of encouragement' and that kind of was my situation."

Tarantino quit school - "the worst institution ever imposed on me"— at 16 and took a job as an usher at "a full-on triple-X porno cinema" called the Pussycat Theatre. "I have always considered that with all the setbacks I had, the fact that I didn't give up is maybe the one thing in my life that I am most proud of," he says. "I just knew I would live a life of unfulfilment if I didn't keep trying.

"So I just kept at it and by the time I wrote Reservoir Dogs it was time. It was time. And then as much as everything else was just this huge build-up to this tremendous let-down, this was..." He pauses, holding the next word in his mouth, relishing the feel of it, "easy! I wrote the script quickly and we were making the film in, like, seven months."

High standards

The movie premiered to acclaim at the 1992 Sundance film festival, securing Tarantino's reputation, at the age of 29, as one of the most exciting new talents in the business. "It was," he says, "the complete utter payoff of perseverance."

Protecting his "oeuvre" is key, he says, and that is why he has already decided he will quit filmmaking while he's still at the top of his game, around the age of 60. "Directors are not famous for knowing when to leave the party," he says. "I don't want to make old geriatric colostomy bag movies. I want to make hard-d***k movies and I want them all to come from the same place as Reservoir Dogs; from the same artist, from the same man.

"My point is this. If some kid in 30 years' time is going to watch one of my movies and he doesn't know who the hell I am, but he likes it so much he says ‘I want to see something else by this dude', I want to make sure he likes the next one he grabs, too. If you see [Billy Wilder's classic] Some Like it Hot and then the next Wilder movie you see is [his widely derided final film] Buddy Buddy it's going to kick you in the shins. I don't want those embarrassments. To me, it's all about a solid filmography."

He already has his retirement mapped out. "I will be a film critic and just become a man of letters," he says grandly. "That will be a lovely thing to do as an older man. It's a reward I intend to give myself for dedicating so much of myself to the thing I'm doing now."

Lonely

Tarantino lives alone in Beverly Hills. He hasn't had a serious girlfriend since his two-year relationship with Sofia Coppola broke down in 2006. "I've been alone most of my life, I was an only child, raised by a single mother, so I am very comfortable with my own company."

His attempts to divert his attention from filmmaking often fail. When he reads a book, it takes him "twice as long as normal people" because he's constantly figuring out how he would film it. His passion for cinema is all-consuming. Does he ever have doubts? Moments when he fears he has dedicated too much of himself to film, to his attempts to carve a monument in a medium that deals, after all, in flickering shadows on a screen? "No," he says, emphatically. "I feel the exact opposite, actually. The day I don't want to give everything to making movies is the day I want to quit. It's not a part-time thing. It's not a summer house, it's not a second house, it's the house. It's my life.

"I ask myself am I giving it enough? Am I concentrating enough? Am I devoting enough of my life to it? That's what I'm here for right now. If you're a mountain climber and your desire is to climb Everest and Fuji and Kilimanjaro - that's what you're doing. It ain't about nothing else. When you're climbing Everest you're not thinking about your bills and you're not thinking about your girlfriend, you're not thinking about bull***t that all the other humans are thinking about. You're thinking about Everest.

"That's how I feel about filmmaking. This is my time to make films. It's not going to be later. I think I am going to live to be a very old man but that will not be my time to climb Everest."

He pauses to catch his breath, his dark, deep-set eyes glittering beneath the most famous forehead in film like water at the bottom of a well. "This," he booms, rapping his knuckles on the table. "This is my time."