Quentin Tarantino: Filmmaker's career seems to improve with age as new film The Hateful Eight hits big screen

'I’m probably only going to make 10 movies'

Quentin unchained (Action Press/REX)

When Quentin Tarantino came bounding on to the stage to introduce the European premiere of his new film The Hateful Eight at the Odeon, Leicester Square, last week, his reckless enthusiasm was as evident as ever. He whooped it up, introduced three of his Hateful Eight (Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins and Tim Roth), went into a mini-monologue praising his British distributors for showing the film in 70mm and then hurled his microphone to the ground with a gunslinger’s nonchalance as he made his exit.

Tarantino is now 52 years old. He may have filled out, but middle age becomes him remarkably well. Even when he was a young movie brat, fresh from working in a video rental store and making early films like Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), he seemed very drawn to characters who were already a little long in the tooth. He is now himself the age of those world- weary hitmen, over-the-hill boxers or assassins played by actors like John Travolta, Bruce Willis and David Carradine in his movies.

The Hateful Eight itself is a youth-free zone. Its cast consists almost entirely of grizzled old-timers. Michael Madsen is looking bulkier and even more threatening than when he was cutting off the policeman’s ear in Reservoir Dogs. Jennifer Jason Leigh has even more of a malicious gleam in her eye than when she was playing the psychopath in Single White Female.

The only remotely youthful cast member is New Zealand stuntwoman turned actress Zoë Bell, who plays “Six Horse Judy”, but she doesn’t get very much screen time.

With Tarantino, movies are always the first point of reference. His own films are complex, self-reflexive affairs that are built on his own enthusiasms as a cinephile. He has always been promiscuous in his tastes, inspired in equal measure by film noir and Asian horror, by Westerns, war films and Italian exploitation pictures.

Tarantino is famously generous to other filmmakers. The Italian B-film auteur Enzo G Castellari (the director of the original Inglorious Bastards) speaks with huge affection for the US director, who has recorded commentaries for DVD releases of Castellari’s films.

When they met for the first time to watch Castellari’s films together at the Venice Festival (where Tarantino had programmed a series of screenings of “King of the Bs”), Tarantino embraced him and shouted out “maestro”.

To his amazement, Castellari realised that Tarantino knew every single line in his films. “And each shot that he liked, he would say, ‘Jesus, fuck you man!’ And he would give me a punch.” When the film finished, with Castellari’s shoulders still aching from all the enthusiastic blows he had received, Tarantino leapt to his feet and yelled out “my master, my master”.

Tarantino has dealt with racial politics in US society far more frankly than most of his peers in Hollywood. (Reuters)

A little surprisingly given his immersion in movies, Tarantino himself is currently at the centre of a political firestorm in the US. He has provoked the wrath of the US police authorities. In late October, the New York City Police called for a boycott of Tarantino’s movies after the director spoke during a Rise Up! protest against police brutality.

“When I see murders, I do not stand by. . . I have to call the murderers the murderers,” the New York Post quoted the director as saying.

His remarks were considered inflammatory because they were made just a few days after a New York cop had been shot and killed in Harlem. As the New York Post reported, the cops were furious with the Pulp Fiction director.

“It’s no surprise that someone who makes a living glorifying crime and violence is a cop-hater, too,” Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, commented in a statement. “The police officers that Quentin Tarantino calls ‘murderers’ aren’t living in one of his depraved big-screen fantasies – they’re risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to protect communities from real crime and mayhem… New Yorkers need to send a message to this purveyor of degeneracy that he has no business coming to our city to peddle his slanderous ‘Cop Fiction’.”

It was an unseemly row – one that threatened to overshadow the release of The Hateful Eight. There was even speculation that the allegations Tarantino was a cop-hater could harm the movie’s chances in the race for awards.

Thankfully, as the release of The Hateful Eight comes nearer, the controversy over Tarantino’s remarks about cops is receding (Getty)

As the spat over police brutality underlines, it’s a mistake to regard Tarantino as someone so obsessed with movies that he pays no attention to real life – or to debates about such matters as gun control in contemporary US society. The director’s own movies are indeed famously violent, but that violence is always heavily stylised. There is more blood spilled in Tarantino films than in even the goriest Jacobean revenge tragedies.

To his detractors, it seems as if Tarantino wants to have it both ways: to be a director who makes hip, ironic movies in which the most gruesome scenes are tongue in cheek, while also filling his work with social commentary.

Tarantino has dealt with racial politics in US society far more frankly than most of his peers in Hollywood. At times, he has been heavily criticised, especially by Spike Lee, for his flippancy and use of the “n” word. Nonetheless, in his own cartoonish, satirical way, he is always ready to tackle taboos. For example, both in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, he has been prepared to look at slavery and its legacy.

Given his predilection for action, you might think that Tarantino would be a director obsessed with making “Movies for Men”. Look through his work, though, and you’ll find that many of the most memorable roles (from Uma Thurman in Kill Bill to Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight) are played by women. For all the violence and mayhem he unleashes in his movies, what really makes them special is his writing. No-one can match the zinging, quickfire wit of his dialogue. He has the knack of making the dialogue as lively and outrageous as the visuals.

Kurt Russell (who gives one of the best performances of his career as a big-whiskered bounty hunter in The Hateful Eight) expressed to the BBC’s Graham Norton just what it is like to work on a Quentin Tarantino set.

“Come prepared to give everything you can think of… if you come ready to play, you’re going to have the time of your life. If you’re not ready to play or you’re lazy or it doesn’t click or it doesn’t mean that much to you, then it is not going to work.”

Thankfully, as the release of The Hateful Eight comes nearer, the controversy over Tarantino’s remarks about cops is receding and attention is turning toward the movie instead. It’s a big widescreen spectacle with a thumping Ennio Morricone score and deserves to be savoured. Every Tarantino movie is an event – and there may not be that many more to come. “I’m probably only going to make 10 movies,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter last week. We should appreciate them while we can.

‘The Hateful Eight’ is released in the UK on 8 January