Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
like a… trooper.
‘Quentin, come here this instant!’
The shy little boy appeared at his mother’s side.
‘Don’t you let me hear you using that kind of foul language ever again. Do you understand?’
Instead of looking down solemnly at the carpet, Quentin was bursting to explain. ‘I didn’t say that, Mom. GI Joe said it.’
A wry smile appeared on Curt’s face and he nudged his wife. But Connie was in no mood to laugh. The boy had to be taught the difference between right and wrong.
‘You just tell him not to use that kinda language in this house.’
‘But, Mom…’
‘No buts. D’you understand?’
Quentin walked away with his tail only just between his legs. How could he tell a platoon of tough guy soldiers not to swear…
Quentin also had superhero dolls like Superman, Aquaman, Superman and Batman. But Connie noticed that he was reluctant to allow any interaction between his GI Joes and the rest of the figures, apart from Superman. Well aware of his mother’s keen interest in that particular superhero, Quentin occasionally permitted his soldier dolls to get into scraps with Superman, but he had a problem: he did not know who should win.
The only other doll Quentin got attached to was a Sindy doll left at the house by one of his cousins. One day Connie caught Quentin trying to re-enact a love scene from a movie he had just seen. Sindy was banned immediately.
One Halloween, Connie bought Quentin his own GI Joe fancy-dress outfit and he went out trick-or-treating. But as he didn’t have many friends locally, it was a lonely task and he came home less than an hour later with few candies and a sad look on his face. He had already decided he preferred hanging out with grown-ups.
By this time, Connie had filled the house with men. There was Curt, her kid brother Roger, and Curt’s brother Cliff. Quentin was in his element. He got so used to having one or other of the grown-ups to play with that he would get very demanding if none of the three men were around.
One Saturday morning, Connie and her three male residents overslept. At about ten, her brother Roger came rushing into the bedroom.
‘Quentin has gone! I can’t find him anywhere.’
Connie shot out of bed, aware that they lived on a very busy street and fearful that her little boy might have wandered out amongst the roaring traffic. As she ran up and down the road frantically looking for her son, Curt and Roger searched the house from top to bottom. But there was absolutely no sign of Quentin.
A distraught Connie came back into the house and headed towards the phone to call the police. Suddenly a small figure in a Superman outfit leapt out of a clothes hamper in the hall, giggling hysterically. The hamper was Quentin’s changing room. Superman had his phone box; Quentin had his clothes hamper.
Quentin felt he had gained just the right level of attention with his stunt. That would teach them to sleep late on a Saturday morning and not play with him.
Connie was furious. For the first time she hit her child. Neither of them ever forgot the incident, but for entirely different reasons. Connie believed it was the first step in building his sense of self-discipline. Quentin, she believes, saw it as a classic example of injustice.
Connie has never regretted hitting Quentin occasionally as a child. She even used to pretend to have a worse temper than she really had in order to intimidate him whenever she believed he was up to no good.
‘For a while, Quentin was convinced I was insane. He could not quite trust what I was going to do to him if he misbehaved. He felt as if he walked a tightrope with me,’ she explains. Sometimes Connie would scream and yell at Quentin in order to drive home a point. There was a lot of hysteria and it certainly disturbed Quentin at times. But the only consistent characteristic of his upbringing was its unpredictability.
Despite occasional bust-ups, Quentin and his mother remained very close throughout his childhood. There was a remarkable bond between them. They were like two children growing up together.
Connie was too young to impose the usual restrictions on her son. For instance, when Quentin was aged six or seven, she would take him to see movies that most parents would never have considered suitable for their children. One of the first adult films Quentin saw was Carnal Knowledge, starring Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson.
The movie centres around a college student who embarks on an enthusiastic and varied sex life and then becomes bored and disillusioned after reaching middle age. When it was first released, some of the more lurid scenes caused quite an outcry in the press. Young Quentin conveniently got up from his seat and headed for the popcorn stand every time a sex scene came on the screen.
Twenty years later, as Quentin toiled over his script for Natural Born Killers, he came up with a scene that reflected the way he had been affected by seeing explicit sex at an early age. In the original screenplay – much of which was altered drastically by director Oliver Stone after he purchased the script – Quentin tells a story through serial killer Mickey (played in the movie by Woody Harrelson) about how a little boy goes to see an adult-rated movie with his big sister and her boyfriend. The boy’s mother asks the little boy what he saw in the movie theatre and the child plays out every sexual act, from kissing and ‘feeling her up’ to oral sex and masturbation.
It is a crude scene, and was changed by Oliver Stone, but it provides a fascinating insight into the way Quentin’s mind works. He never forgot his reaction to being taken to see such adult films. Undoubtedly he gained a vast amount of knowledge, but at the same time he recognises the harm that may have been done.
Not long after seeing Carnal Knowledge, Quentin once more found himself with his mother in a movie theatre – the Tarzana 6 in Harbor City – watching The Wild Bunch. It was a double bill with Deliverance, about a group of men from the city who go on a canoe trip. The expedition turns to horror when the local hillbillies decide to try and kill them.
Connie had been determined to see Deliverance because it starred Burt Reynolds, the actor whose character, Quint, in Gunsmoke, had provided the inspiration for Quentin’s name. She expected a romantic adventure movie, but was stunned by one particularly disturbing scene which has also remained with Quentin ever since. It involved the homosexual rape of one of the canoeists, played in the movie by Ned Beatty.
‘That scared the living shit out of me. Did I understand Ned Beatty being sodomised? No. But I knew he wasn’t having any fun,’ recalled Quentin many years later.
In Pulp Fiction, he recreated the scene by having two rednecks rape a man in the basement of their gun shop. The similarities are clear, with the rednecks even denied the ultimate pleasure of killing their victim. It was almost as if Quentin was trying to rewrite that gruesome scene in Deliverance.
Today, Connie insists that she does not feel at all guilty about taking her young son to see such mature films. ‘I honestly do not think it harmed him in any way.’
Intriguingly, she also took him to see Bambi, but he was so distressed when Bambi’s mother died that he made Connie take him out of the cinema after the first 20 minutes.
At home, Quentin became equally emotional about seemingly harmless cartoons like an episode of The Flintstones in which Bamm-Bamm disappeared and Barney became suicidal as a result. Now that was heavy stuff… Yet back at the local movie theatre, the ultra-violent film Joe was handled with the greatest of ease.
As well as developing his interest in movies, Connie also encouraged Quentin to read from an early age. This gave him a genuine curiosity about the written word. He soon appreciated that television and movie drama was scripted and carefully planned before it was filmed.
At just seven years old, Quentin even understood the importance of structure in the stories he avidly read in comic books and novels. He would