Cinema Speculation

Quentin Tarantino has published a nonfiction book of movie musings, Cinema Speculation, and embarked on an unusual book tour. I saw him at the Castro Theater in San Francisco last night, a ticket which came with a copy of the book.

I have no doubt the book will be an amusing, idiosyncratic and brisk stroll through a part of QT’s cinematic mind. It focusses on American studio films of the late 60s/early 70s period of his childhood, when his mom changed history by taking him to see adult-oriented movies at a very young age. This gives me some fodder if I want to blame my dad, who refused to let me see R-rated movies for many years, for my not being a world-famous director by now.

I enjoyed the event at the Castro, I think, because I was realistic about what to expect. That is, I had few expectations except that someone would press PLAY on Quentin and he would talk at length about whatever he felt like. This is essentially what happened, although the interviewer was so bad at her job that that’s all there was. Her name was Kim Morgan. She’s a film writer and screenwriter, married to Guillermo del Toro, previously married to Guy Maddin, and she’s published in a lot of film journals and magazines and shows up on boutique disks and festival juries and things like that.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, she was a weak interviewer in this case. Quentin Tarantino does not need much encouragement to speak, but he benefits from a very sharp and knowledgeable interlocutor. Morgan seemed fairly knowledgeable, but not in a way that was useful to the audience. That is, she was able to more or less keep up with Tarantino’s Hollywood history name-dropping so it seemed as if she knew what he was talking about, but what was needed was an audience surrogate who could help the audience understand what he was talking about.

But she even forgot some basics. She did not ever introduce herself or explain why she was there. She came out (the show started forty minutes late, for some reason), sat down and called him out without more ado. They got into a conversation that they seemed to be picking up from an earlier conversation—perhaps one they had been having offstage for the previous forty minutes? and never did any context-setting or setup. No “why did you want to write this book” or “you’re famous for making and talking about movies—is it different to write about them?” or “tell us about your research” or anything like that.

Nor did she make any effort to relate the information he shared from the book back to his own storied career. Or ask any of the philosophical questions that arose. She had clearly read the book and rewatched certain movies in preparation for the conversation, but this served basically as a reminder of her outline, which was to just get him to tell us what was in the book. Maybe there were agreements about what he did not want to talk about. Even so, thanks to her the conversation was pretty insular, did not attempt to connect with a diverse audience (some of whom were old enough to murmur aloud that they remembered seeing a movie in the theater, too, in the 1960s and 70s; some of whom were young enough to never have seen an actual film projection), and seemed to assume a uniformly high film literacy.

In spite of the interlocutor, Quentin was still interesting to listen to as he reviewed the catalog of his obsessions and told some personal stories. He talked about Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma and Don Siegel and many actors with his typical omnivorous idiosyncrasy. Mostly it was enjoyable just to see and hear the man, who has been perhaps the most important filmmaker of my generation.

There was at one point an interesting conversation about the anti-establishment filmmakers of the late 60s and early 70s (among whom De Palma became one of the most successful) and the “movie brat” generation that adored the establishment Hollywood filmmakers of their childhood (the slightly younger Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas). Morgan asked where that earlier anti-establishment thread still appeared in today’s Hollywood, if it does. It was somewhat gratifying to me that—although he said he didn’t exactly enjoy the film—Tarantino talked about the movie Blonde as feeling to him of that tradition.

The evening ended with an amusing reading of the first chapter of his book, which recounts Quentin’s adventures in moviegoing from about age 4 to 10, with his mother and others.