Are we really going to need the audiobook version? From the very first page, the author’s unmistakable voice ricochets between the reader’s ears: giggling, provoking, digressing, seducing and dropping deadpan little hints about his own life.
Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Quentin Tarantino has published his first work of movie criticism, a study of his personal favourites from the New American Cinema era, including superb, boisterous pieces on Peter Yates’s Bullitt, John G Avildsen’s Joe, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, John Boorman’s Deliverance, Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley. Just as with his recent novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – based on his own film of the same title – Tarantino unleashes a trivia torrent, forcing you to stand fully clothed under his personal Niagara of cinephile references.
It’s exasperating at first. But as so often in the past, I fell under Tarantino’s eerie spell. His passionate knowledge of movies and TV is amazing and slightly terrifying. This kind of engagement is on a level that few ever reach. Among Brit film-makers, only Edgar Wright can match Tarantino’s superhuman encyclopedism.
Despite the title, there’s not much that’s speculative about it. The keynote is cheerful, resounding certainty. Having said which, he does indulge in some expert what-if fantasising about how films could have been made another way, particularly Taxi Driver. He hates the Bernard Herrmann music, describing it as “the minimalist car noise – asshole with a sax – score Hermann pawned off on Scorsese”. Tarantino also thinks it’s important to understand that Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle was never actually in Vietnam at all because a real Vietnam veteran would not be so wary of and ignorant about Black people. He says it was cowardly to turn the Black pimp of Paul Schrader’s original script into a white man (though conceding the brilliance of Harvey Keitel’s performance) and wonders aloud how it might have played differently with other mooted directors: Richard Mulligan or Brian De Palma, or with the studio’s first pick, Jeff Bridges, in the lead.
Yet Tarantino’s insights, brazen and brilliant as they always are, are weirdly upstaged by the tiny, unfollowed-up hints he drops about his own psyche – which comprise the ostensible “memoir” part of the book. Tarantino doesn’t talk about his father Tony’s absence from his life but says at the age of seven, he was taken by his mother and stepfather to see the highly adult film Joe in a double bill. The other film, for the record, was Carl Reiner’s comedy Where’s Poppa? Where indeed?
Young Quentin was befriended and even mentored as a boy by a Black man called Floyd who rented a room in his mother’s house: a garrulous, charming individual who loved cinema like Tarantino, but casually broke promises to take him to the movies. Tarantino implies that this man was the model for the character Ordell Robbie, played by Samuel L Jackson, in his great film Jackie Brown, starring Pam Grier. Floyd also wrote an unproduced screenplay, a western called Billy Spencer, which Tarantino says inspired his Django Unchained. So … is Floyd a father figure? Tarantino doesn’t develop or acknowledge the obvious implications. He doesn’t give it another thought. There is no self-analysis, no serious discussion of anything outside the movie theatre. Is he leaving the analysis – the speculation – up to the reader? Either way, this is an addictively readable piece of movie evangelism.
• Cinema Speculation is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
