“I didn’t know that newspapers were as good at the art of speculation as I am!” laughs Quentin Tarantino. The cult filmmaker, never short of puns, of course alludes to the title of the book he came to present this Wednesday evening on the stage of the Grand Rex, in Paris. Cinema Speculations. “Guess the press was better than me on that one. »
After a two-hour conversation and reading about his childhood spent in Los Angeles cinemas with Connie and Kurt, his mother and stepfather, about the cultural revolution that New Hollywood represented in the 1970, and his favorite filmmakers, the director of Pulp Fiction finally put an end to the unbearable suspense and reassured his fans who had come in large numbers to attend the maestro’s master class. “Yes, that’s it, I’ve finished the script for what will be my tenth and final film. I’ll probably shoot it in the fall. All I can tell you is that it will be called The Movie Critic and that, no, it will not be a biopic of Pauline Kael [great critic of the New Yorker who died in 2001, Ed] as it was announced a few days ago. Attention, I have a huge admiration for Pauline Kael and I have no doubt that a film about her could be brilliant, but that’s not what I’m preparing. »
No tweets, photos or videos will be published at this time, despite the impatience of the 2,800 fans stamping their feet in the room. Deposit requires, the evening is phone free. Mean by this that the laptops are put in airplane mode at the entrance to the cinema and neutralized in a locked pocket until the end of the evening. Everyone is therefore asked to take their place wisely, holding their sealed telephone in their hands. Behind the sympathetic argument of rediscovered conviviality, we can clearly see the director’s fear of seeing his words escape him on the Web.
A few hours before going on stage, during an interview granted to Le Point, he exults: “What is it like to cut yourself off for a few hours from the world? It’s amazing, but I think it became an experience in itself! We come out transformed, you’ll see. “Transformed, perhaps not, but one thing is certain, the generalized cut monopolizes all the conversations. While some have to go downstairs to have their wallet opened because their ticket is saved in their phone, others realize that they can’t afford popcorn because they have no other way to settle that a mobile now unusable.
We no longer know what time it is. Here and there the angst mounts – how long is the show, again? For Tarantino, the evening could not start under better auspices. In the room, the public religiously browses the celebrated book as if it were the Bible and nothing – not even the machine-gun delivery of the filmmaker who intervenes in English without subtitles – seems to disturb the faithful who have come to attend the great – cinema mass.
“Long live the cinema”, proclaims the guru, before answering questions from the general director of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux. Then it’s about Little Q, the kid not very good in class who had decided that all adults were movie geniuses, extraordinary beings who knew everything about actors, their roles, filming. From this education in dark rooms in front of films, sometimes violent, that other children were not allowed to watch. “When I asked my mom why she let me see those movies,” Tarantino says, “she would say, ‘Quentin, I worry about you more when you watch the news. A movie can’t hurt!” »
Then, the director improvises himself as a film historian, going from the small to the big story. How did the new Hollywood revolutionize cinema in the 1970s, before giving way to entertainment cinema and happy endings? To answer this question, which was also the salt of his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he obviously invokes his personal pantheon – Francis Ford Coppola, George Roy Hill, and of course Brian de Palma – and dissects the emotions that he provided, at the time, these hundreds of films discovered at the Tiffany Theatre. “Which of your films are you going to show your children first?” asks Frémaux. Which movie dad are you? Filmmaker’s response: “Perhaps it’s up to my wife, who is present in the room, to answer you!” I think I’ll let them decide, but if I put myself in my son’s shoes and imagine what an 8, 10 year old kid’s tastes might be like, I’d still say Kill Bill. But this is only speculation…”