The films of Quentin Tarantino’s childhood

Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with QT and PTA on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,’ she informed the New Yorker some years later. I suppose that’s one accolade the pair will have to agree to share: conversation so unstimulating it undoes all the good effects of hard drugs.

Part of his problem – as the reader of Cinema Speculation quickly notices – is that, as well as being one of the pre-eminent filmmakers of his generation, Tarantino is also an unreconstructed anorak: a self-confessed ‘brash know-it-all film geek’. And as with anoraks, the love he has for his subject is a selfish kind of love. It is a love that doubles- back on itself and becomes part of its own object of fascination. He is more interested in documenting his sensations and observations, and the fact that he had them, than in whether you’re interested in hearing about them.

Though billed as a mixture of ‘film theory’ and ‘personal history’, Cinema Speculation is mainly a collection of critical essays about the films Tarantino saw as a child in the 1970s, when his mother used to take ‘little Q’ along on her date nights. Most of those celebrated here – Deliverance, Taxi Driver, The Wild Bunch, Rolling Thunder, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – strike the reader as grossly eccentric entertainment for a child. ‘I saw a lot of intense shit,’ Tarantino reflects: ‘Just making a list of the wild, violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appal most readers.’