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Pulp Fiction is packed with such guilty
pleasures. Number one at the box office since
its release on Oct. 14, Tarantino's second film
shoots the express track from horror to glee
and back as its dauntless characters-led by hit
men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson,
boxer Bruce Willis, and bad girl Thurman-go
about bloodying their B-movie lives.
The drumbeat of publicity for Pulp Fiction has
been building for so long- since it won the
Palme d'Or last May at Cannes-that you may
already know what a bundle of high-contrast
impulses the 31-year-old Tarantino is. You may
already have read that he left school at 16 and
expanded his encyclopedic knowledge of film as
a clerk in a suburban L.A. video store. You may
already have gleaned that the director sees
himself as a writer first, or an actor first, and
that he's so talkative and sweet-spirited he's
bound to contradict himself trying to agree
with you. You may have heard how
appreciative Tarantino is of the entire
filmmaking spectrum-from Jean-Luc Godard to
John Woo to Wyatt Earp-and how he can't
stand what Oliver Stone did to his script for
Natural Born Killers. You may know of
Tarantino's collections of '70s board games and
lunch boxes and may have seen the
trash-culture connoisseur ebulliently show
David Letterman how the Aristocats did the
twist. You may have watched Letterman heap
praise on Pulp Fiction five times in as many
weeks as Tarantino, Travolta, Jackson, and
Willis (twice) took turns as prerelease guests.
And you may be thinking, Enough already. Well,
sometimes, so is ! Quentin Tarantino.
"I want to, like, spend a year. I want to just
spend some time, sleeping late, watching films,
watching my video, watching my laserdisc.
Hang out with my friends. Travel. And then,
just kind of, like, organically find it."
At 9:30 a.m. Tarantino is looking slightly
rumpled and talking less quickly than usual as
he blends an ugly potion of coffee, protein
powder, and Sweet 'n Low in his kitchen. In
the midst of his six-month, fame-making
promotional marathon, he's thinking the
unthinkable: sabbatical. "I've talked to people
in the industry, and I say I'm taking a year off,
and they go, 'How can you afford to?'" he
recounts, shifting into narrative gear. "They
don't even get the moves."
He follows with several hundred rapid-fire
words on what it takes out of a person to
make a movie, how the clock's always ticking,
how you can't plan an evening out. For
Tarantino, time to "organically find it" means
locating the next idea worth spending two
years realizing even as it ruins his life. "And the
worst part is at the very beginning," he says,
"the very, very, very beginning, when you're
kind of driving into the fog. You're not in the
fog yet, but you see the fog."
Thus Tarantino girds himself. He's already
looking past this moment in the sun and the
requirements of show business. He figures he
can keep making modestly budgeted movies
because, however risky his violent,
speechifying concoctions may prove here,
"America is just another market." A major name
overseas since Reservoir Dogs, his 1992
directorial debut, Tarantino has been mobbed
by fans in Paris and Tokyo. Tarantino says the
$1.5 million Dogs-more violent and
concentrated than Pulp-has earned a
remarkable $7 million in video sales and $6
million from its theatrical run in the U.K. "My
attitude," he says, hands flailing as usual, "is,
How little money can I get and still make
exactly the movie I want to make? Because
the less I spend the more I'll make."
That's not greed talking but caution. His
clothing is still strictly grunge; his car, a red
Geo Metro; his shelter, a $1,200-a-month
one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood
that he began renting in 1993. The idea: Keep
the overhead low. "I'm trying to get away from
this hit/flop horse-race mentality that
Hollywood has." But Tarantino says that thanks
to foreign advances, the $8 million Pulp was in
the black before it opened, and he isn't above
needling the competition. Ten days and $21
million into Pulp's run, he says: "We'll make
more money for Miramax by the end of the
week than The Specialist will for Warners a
year from now."
How to account for Tarantino's cult cachet? An
entire newsgroup on the Internet is devoted to
debates over who shot Mr. Pink in Dogs and
whether Tarantino is ripping off or paying
homage to earlier films in his own. Director
Allison Anders (Mi Vida Loca), who got to know
him after the two debuted at the '92 Sundance
Film Festival, says his works "make you feel in
on an experience that's exclusive, even if it's
not, even if it's the top- grossing movie of the
weekend."
The rest of the answer may be that he does
the same thing for his actors, and it shows. For
the first time in years, Willis didn't ask to see
rough cuts; he trusted Tarantino. "It's the
most creative process I've ever been involved
in," says the actor. "We worked on a level of
focus and detail I've never experienced
before."
Travolta chokes up when he considers what
Tarantino has done for him. "There (are) very
few people that tune into you as an artist the
way Quentin tuned into me," he says. "Quentin
gave me my job back as an actor."
"I'm as totally serious about what I'm doing,
you know, as a heart attack," the director
states, "but I don't take myself seriously. I
take the work seriously."
The only painting among the many movie
posters in Tarantino's apartment hangs above
the action figures on the living-room mantel.
It's of his once and current love, Grace
Lovelace, an English professor at the University
of California at Irvine. (The name Grace adorns
a motorcycle in Pulp.) Tarantino's friends-who
say he's been looking forward to being famous
for a long time-are reassured by his
resurrected romance. Jerry Martinez, an
employee at the Manhattan Beach video store
where Tarantino worked for five years, says
that his script for '93's True Romance "tells you
a lot about Quentin's fantasies. He's truly a
romantic. He's a sweet, decent guy."
"He's a ham," says Connie Zastoupil,
Tarantino's mother, "(but) he has a very level
head."
According to Zastoupil, 47, a health-care
executive, Tarantino's biography has already
evolved into something larger than life. "Most
of what I read is not true," she says. "In the
beginning I thought Quentin was trying to
glamorize things. I said to him, 'Where are they
getting these L'il Abner stories?'"
Yes, Tarantino's mother was born in
Tennessee, and so was Quentin, but they're no
products of Dogpatch. Zastoupil attended high
school in L.A. and wed college student Tony
Tarantino at 16; within three months she left
her husband and took off for the University of
Tennessee, where she learned she was
pregnant. At 19 she earned a degree in
microbiology and returned to California.
Tarantino was adopted by his mother's new
husband, a musician, Curt Zastoupil. The
couple divorced when Quentin was 9. Tarantino
has "never shown any real interest" in meeting
his father, says his mother. "I know his name,"
Tarantino says flatly.
Young Quentin liked horror movies but was too
scared to sit through Bambi, and though his IQ
tested at 160, he avoided school. His mother
knew that if he wasn't in class, he was home
writing. "He wrote me sad Mother's Day
stories," she recalls. "He'd always kill me and
tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough
to bring a tear to a mother's eye."
The year of restful vegetation Tarantino was
planning has quite a crowded agenda now.
Tarantino, who's played small roles in his own
films and steals the show with his cameo in this
fall's Sleep With Me (he explicates the
homoerotic subtext of Top Gun), was three
weeks into acting out his Destiny- the title role
in the independent comedy Destiny Turns On
the Radio-when Pulp Fiction opened last
month. Next year he'll have his second big role,
in the French film Hands Up!, to be shot in L.A.
with actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Cement
Garden).
In December, he'll direct one of four episodes
of Miramax's anthology film Four Rooms, with
fellow Sundance alumni Anders, Robert
Rodriguez (El Mariachi), and Alexandre Rockwell
(In the Soup). "It's one day in the life of a
hotel like the Chateau Marmont on New Year's
Eve," says Miramax cochairman Harvey
Weinstein, who helped sign a top-flight cast for
scale, headed by Willis and Madonna. Tim Roth
stars as the bellboy in the interlocking stories,
which the four writer-directors wrote
separately, then hitched together into what
they hope will be a seamless whole. Tarantino
costars with Willis in his episode. Doesn't
writing and directing himself in Four Rooms
qualify as work? "Compared to Pulp," he says,
"it's just push-ups."
And then, some time in '95, he hopes to pierce
that fog and "find it." He's already passed on
Speed Racer but wouldn't mind directing The
Man From U.N.C.L.E. "That's something I would
do a real good job with, a big summer movie,
let's go for it," he says and pauses. "Now, I still
think I would spend less than other people."
Other options: He and his producer, Lawrence
Bender, may make two $5 million movies
back-to-back with the same crew as part of
his Miramax first-look deal. And Weinstein says
he has acquired four Elmore Leonard novels,
including Freaky Deaky, at Tarantino's
suggestion; Weinstein hopes he'll direct one of
them.
But for now he's acting. And trying to keep
perspective. At the Oct. 12 press conference
at which David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and
Steven Spielberg announced their intention to
form a new studio, Spielberg, when asked what
movies they want to make, said, "We'd love to
have a Pulp Fiction from talent like Tarantino."
Meanwhile, Tarantino, the man whose name is
on everyone's lips, was busy acting in Destiny.
Talking about his role as the god of gamblers,
he boasted to pal Anders, "I'm number two on
the call sheet!"
"That's nice, dear," she replied.
