Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
melee. Before any punches were thrown, he’d ask his foe to wait a few seconds while he removed his dangling afraid it could be ripped clean off his ear. (This was the sort of deft touch that would be reflected in his movies years later.)
One time a customer came into Video Archives with a tape that was more than three months late. A few days were considered okay, but this was pushing it. Quentin informed the man how much it was going to cost in late fees and he retorted, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money. I’m just going to keep the tape.’
He then started to walk out. Quentin followed. Just as the man turned round, Quentin went – boom! – into his chest and then pushed him outside the front door of the store. All the other staff watched boggled-eyed. On the sidewalk, Quentin swung into him again and then pushed him all the way up the road.
On another occasion, Quentin grabbed a customer by the back of the head and – bam! – slammed his head into the corner of the counter. There was blood everywhere. ‘It was like a Quentin movie device,’ recalls Roger Avary. ‘The blood came out of the forehead area and sort of collected in the eye socket.’
Quentin did not get into fights at the drop of a hat, but he knew how far he would go if he got into a punch-up, although he really did not want to go very far. If someone challenged him physically, he would not hesitate to retaliate. Yet there were other occasions when he would be having a massive argument but never even consider crossing that line. It was all a matter of how he felt at that particular moment.
Despite such occurrences, working at Video Archives was for the most part a highly pleasurable experience for Quentin. ‘It was like my Village Voice,’ he explained later, referring to the New York newspaper that had become a virtual bible for hundreds of thousands of young Americans. In other words, he got to review any film he liked. He adored putting a video in a customer’s hands and then explaining to them why the movie was good or bad. It was all part of his movie self-education.
Avary – who was a couple of years older than Quentin – seemed to have far more purist views on films. At one stage, he became very concerned that he and Quentin were becoming completely dominated by home-entertainment movies rather than going to cinemas. He therefore made a point of going with Quentin to see an art-house movie every fortnight so they could soak up the atmosphere and enjoy a coffee afterwards with the art-house brigade.
Whenever they could afford it, the two friends would attend the retrospectives of famous directors that were regularly shown at various movie theatres in LA. It was at one such event that Quentin discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Typically, Quentin was objective about the Frenchman’s material until he had seen it for himself. He decided he would go and see Godard’s movies and then make up his own mind whether or not he liked them. If he didn’t respond to them, that would be that.
The first Godard movie Quentin saw was Little Soldier. It knocked him out. He went back the following night to see Godard’s original version of Breathless and immediately proclaimed it one of the finest movies ever made. Quentin was hooked. He went to the Godard retrospective every night for a week and the Frenchman became one of his biggest directorial and screenwriting influences.
To Quentin, the best thing about Godard’s movies was that he managed to get across the idea that if you just love movies enough, you can make great films. You don’t have to go to school and you don’t have to know a lens from a bag of sand, but if you get your hands on a camera you could make one just like Godard.
Back at Video Archives, various important customers were starting to sit up and take notice of Quentin. Film and TV producer John Langley – who created the phenomenally successful American real-life series Cops – was regularly treated to doses of Quentin and Roger Avary.
‘They had a purist appreciation for the medium,’ remembers Langley. ‘Sometimes you would have to wait to get service while they quizzed you about a movie you had done a rewrite on, but these guys knew the whole canon.’
Langley would often find himself eating popcorn – they sold it in Video Archives – and chatting with Quentin, who he now says was ‘so opinionated about everything under the sun it was brilliant’.
For Quentin and Avary, and a host of other young film-makers who came of age in the video era, VCRs had a huge impact on their movie education. Videos allowed this new wave of auteurs to absorb vintage films without going to film school. In the dark days before VCRs, top film directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg had to undertake formal film training, partly because that was where the old films were.
Interestingly, as Quentin and Avary continued working at Video Archives, more and more film geeks gravitated towards the store. They were people who loved movies passionately but did not have the contacts, or know-how, to break into the movie business.
Soon after he started work at Archives, it became apparent that, while Quentin might have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, he was virtually illiterate when it came to ordinary paperwork. He would print everything, rather than write it longhand, and his spelling was still appalling. But he could out-talk anyone when it came to describing the camera angles in all Sergio Leone’s films.
Quentin also became friends with a Video Archives customer called Jerry Martinez, another movie geek who found it extremely difficult to relate to anything if it did not have a film connection. Tall, gangly Quentin and the short, fat Martinez initially got embroiled in a row about Gremlins.
‘I hated it. He liked it,’ explains Martinez. ‘I had been a little hard on the film because I had been expecting something else. You have to remember, we are talking heavy film-geek speak here and we were referring to it as a genre of movie and whether it actually worked.’
Quentin was obsessed by the in-jokes in Gremlins and he was a big champion of the movie’s director, Joe Dante. Martinez joked that this had something to do with the fact that Quentin and Dante shared Italian origins. The movie was a classic example of Dante’s style. Littered with cinematic allusions – to director Frank Capra and 1950s sci–fi – and it used tension and expectation to comic and thrilling effect.
Quentin would now go to movie theatres with Martinez and his brother Chris and try to see every new movie on the first day it was released. More often than not, they would get in for the cheaper matinee performance of one movie and then pay out for an evening showing of another new film. Sometimes they would stay for the late-evening screening as well.
Back at Video Archives, Quentin helped Martinez get a job in the same way Roger Avary had helped him, and the family atmosphere grew even stronger. The staff there were beginning to get quite a reputation throughout the area for their knowledge and stock of obscure films. They even started to get phone calls from customers in different parts of the country armed with bizarre descriptions of little-known movies. Quentin, Martinez or Avary would then try and work out what they were referring to.
‘The difference with us was that we felt it was our duty to turn them on to as many of those less famous films as possible and expand their horizons,’ explains Martinez.
Quentin and his new friend also had a particular penchant for he Japanese TV action series Kage No Gundo, starring martial arts legend Sonny Chiba. In True Romance, Clarence (Christian Slater) attends a Chiba triple bill on his birthday. Quentin also showed just how deeply affected he was by certain movies when, after watching Chow Yun-Fat in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow Part II, he turned up at Archives wearing a long coat and dark glasses and walked around with a toothpick in his mouth.
The store was open from 10am to 10pm and staff worked two shifts, although Quentin and his friends would often come early and leave late, hanging out at the shop. They would all congregate around one big-screen TV that hung from the ceiling, dominating the entire store. The staff would watch whatever movie took their fancy, regardless of the taste or sensibilities of their customers. If that movie caught the attention of customers and they looked vaguely interesting, Quentin, Avary or Martinez would start up a debate about some point or other to test that customer’s knowledge. If they turned out to be fellow movie geeks then they might even