The Trib (36 page)

Quentin Tarantino's back. And, true to form, his new film is full of sexy women and fast cars.

9 September 2007

T
he temperature is topping thirty degrees even in the shade on the Martinez Beach in Cannes. Zoë Bell is so flimsily dressed she mightn't be dressed at all. The safest place to look is into her eyes, which isn't difficult.

Whenever things got really nasty in Quentin Tarantino's
Kill Bill
, she was the stunt double for Uma Thurman, the ‘bride' in pursuit of vengeance for the killing of her husband on their wedding day. She impressed Tarantino so much that he asked her to turn to acting in
Death Proof
, his exuberant tribute to gory slasher movies of the 1970s. ‘What if I'm terrible?' she said. ‘You're not going to be terrible because I don't make bad decisions,' he told her.

She shrugs, the thin strap of her silk chemise almost slipping off her shoulder. ‘So what could I say?' she asks me. ‘OK, I told him, I'm going to be amazing.'

Amazing she is, clinging to the hood of a car travelling at 100 mph in a duel to the death with a psychopath – played by sinisterly appealing Kurt Russell – who stalks young girls, involving them in fatal crashes for his sexual gratification.

‘The really fun thing about
Death Proof
is that it changes so much,' says Rosario Dawson, who makes Zoë seem almost overdressed and talks even faster than Tarantino. She plays one of a bevy of female characters who get to kick ass. ‘My character is a little shy; she's not as promiscuous as the other girls, but then she has a sudden turn. It's interesting to see a character turn into a person she never would have imagined being able to see in the mirror.

Although
Reservoir Dogs
gained Tarantino a foul-mouthed macho reputation, his movies invariably feature tough sexy women, whether Uma Thurman in
Pulp Fiction
and
Kill Bill
or Pam Grier in
Jackie Brown
. Perhaps it comes from being brought up with his sister by a single mom, Connie, or his childhood addiction of the 1970s exploitation movies that pioneered black women superheroes. ‘I have male friends, ‘ he says, ‘but I'm fascinated by the dynamic of a bunch of girls who hang out together, like a posse. A lot of my characters come from that.'

Tracie Thoms butts in. ‘We were having a conversation one night, and I was going, “I'm just saying, I'm just saying,”' she says.

‘And Quentin laughed. A week later, we shot a scene outside a store and my line was, “I'm just saying”. That's what's great about him. If something comes up, he goes with it.'

Although famous for an infectious enthusiasm on the set, Tarantino has his down moments. ‘Maybe in the course of a long shoot I might have a couple of days when I'm a grumpy bastard,' he says. ‘There's this crazy movie people have never seen called
Hollywood Man
by Jack Starrett. It's about the making of a motorcycle movie. They're on location and they're having a production meeting in the kitchen of a motel that they're staying at, and the director is being told the bike is not working, the stunt's going to cost too much, and this that and the other, and at one point he goes, “That's it, I've had it, I've f**king had it.” I watched that movie after
Kill Bill
and I laughed so damn hard. I was like, that is the perfect, perfect expression for a director to say, because that's what it is. You've had it.'

It happened to Tarantino twice on
Kill Bill
. ‘I just got sick of making this f**king movie. I got sick of getting up so f**king early every morning, working so goddamn hard. I got sick of not having a life other than this one f**king thing for a year. I just got f**king sick of it. I got sick of answering f**king questions. Now, here's the thing. At a certain point you realise, Aw, poor Quentin, you get to live your dream, you get to be an artist. Aw, isn't life terrible. That makes you snap out of it.'

It happened again later, shooting a night scene with Zoë.

‘I'd told her she had to start thinking like an actress. It's not just jumping through a window to get stunt money. She's not a void here, she's playing my f**king character. So she wasn't used to that. She's very unpretentious. She kind of chuckled a bit but realised I was serious. So she tried to do it. She started really getting it. I'm playing a character. If I put on that costume, I am the bride.

‘Now during that night we were shooting the scene where the bride is on the motorcycle with the helmet. I'm in my little “f**k this” mood. People are scared of me. Somebody comes up. Umh, Zoë needs to talk to you. So I walk over. She's sitting there in her yellow jump suit. I go, Zoë, you want to talk to me, what about? She goes, well you know, I'm scared to do the scene, you know, actor-wise, is there anything you want me to know, anything you want me to think about? Oh, she's thinking this way now. She's an actress. Even though there's a helmet on her face and we can't see her face, she wants to be thinking what I want her to be thinking. And suddenly I wasn't grumpy any more.'

Like John Travolta talking about a Big Mac in
Pulp Fiction
, Tarantino can't open his mouth without going into a riff about something. More than anything else it's what makes his movies so gripping – not the sex, or the cursing or the violence, but the talk. ‘My whole thing is dialogue – that's what I do,' he says, sitting with me on the beach, his open-necked black shirt flapping outside his trousers.

Born in Knoxville Tennessee in 1963, but brought to LA by his mom when he was two, he grew up on television and movies. He got his name Quentin from a Faulkner novel she was reading,
The Sound And The Fury.
He watched
Carnal Knowledge
with her when he was five. When Art Garfunkel tried to talk Candice Bergen into bed, saying ‘Let's do it,' he piped up, ‘What's he wanna do, Mom?' He has an IQ of 160, but dropped out of high school at sixteen to be an usher in a porn cinema and then a video clerk at $4 an hour. The video store became a film school where, between acting classes, he wrote
True Romance
and
Natural Born Killers
. ‘In every movie I've ever done I've been criticised for having long boring dialogue sequences, with the exception of
Kill Bill Vol 1
where they kept complaining I didn't have any dialogue,' he says.

‘You can't be a fan of mine if you don't like my dialogue. Where I'm coming from it's the same thing as going to a Tennessee Williams play or a David Hare play and saying, what's all that f**king dialogue? Am I a playwright? No. But I could be.
Reservoir Dogs
could be a play. Actually when I was writing the first half of
Death Proof,
I was thinking if I want to go where I want to go with this I could make it a play, a kind of exploitation Eugene O'Neill play.'

Death Proof
started out combined with his buddy Robert Rodriquez's zombie romp
Planet Terror
as the second part of a three-hour double-bill homage called
Grindhouse
, the nickname for flea-pit cinemas that screened 1970s over-the-top exploitation flicks. Although
Grindhouse
got rave reviews, it flopped at the US box-office. ‘People didn't want to see two movies at once,' he says. ‘It seems so obvious now, but the whole industry was shocked it didn't do well.'

Outside the US, it was always intended to release fuller versions of the two movies separately. ‘I'd to cut
Death Proof
not only down to the bone but past the bone to make it work for
Grindhouse
,' he says, ‘because otherwise you'd run out of patience waiting for the car chase.' Everything shown in the car chase actually happened. No computer effects were used. ‘CGI car chases to me don't mean shit,' he says. ‘After watching 1970s car chases like
Bullitt
where they actually did it, how can you be impressed by a facsimile of a computer? It's the fact that they did it that was so good.'

Although Tarantino's movies are spattered with movie references, he uses them as a vocabulary to create something completely different. ‘If all I did was quote, I doubt they'd be having me to Cannes for sixteen years,' he says. ‘I have no problem taking things from anybody and using them. I love these genres but I always have a different agenda. I'm using the trappings but mixing their coat of many colours. Every film is a genre movie or a subgenre movie. Bergman achieved a kind of sub-genre to himself. So is doing an adaptation of a Henry James novel more valid than doing a
Women In Prison
? It's different, but is it more valid?'

The newest member of the Hennessy Hall of Fame discusses life, love, work – and why he'll never find the challenge he needs at the Abbey or the Gate.

22 April 2007

W
hen Frank McGuinness was sixteen years old a dismissive teacher changed his life. ‘I won't say it was the making of me, because that would be giving credit to a man who set out to destroy me,' he says, ‘but if I survived that bollocks, I'll survive other bollocks.'

He'd just got his Intermediate Certificate. The teacher wanted him to do science. ‘But we had a terrible science teacher and I knew I wouldn't get the honour I needed to get a scholarship to go to college,' he says. Nobody in his immediate background in Buncrana had ever gone to university. All the women worked in the local shirt factory. ‘If your father had a job, you were middle class,' he recalls.

‘So I said I wanted to do history because I thought I could do it well enough to get an honour. He looked at me and said, “You'll never get to university”. I remember saying nothing but inside I said, “Well I'll do it and I'll do it without you.” And I did it. And that's been my motto. I rarely give up. In fact, I never give up. You have to have that side to you. On many occasions perhaps I should have given up. But I didn't. Absolute ruthlessness may not always be the best policy. However, it's the only one I know. I have to follow my heart, no matter what.'

His determination won him a place at University College Dublin, then a job as a lecturer at the New University of Ulster in Coleraine where he met his lifelong partner, Philip Tilling, fifteen years his elder. Patrick Mason recognised his raw talent in
The Factory Girls
, a play he wrote for a workshop in Galway in 1980 about women shirt workers in Buncrana standing up to their employers. It was accepted by the Abbey Theatre, and directed by Mason, as were his next two plays,
Baglady
and
Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme
, which won him the
London Evening Standard
Award for Most Promising Playwright.

Mason also directed
Innocence
, which caused uproar at the Gate Theatre with its explicit re-imagining of a day in Caravaggio's life.

‘Patrick is an incredible force,' says McGuinness. ‘We're still friends, which is not common in theatre. We have survived each other, although we're not easy men by any stretch of the imagination, and eminently capable of killing each other. I put great store on his love and friendship and I'm immensely proud of his achievements.'

Earlier this year, London's Almeida Theatre premiered McGuinness's thirteenth play,
There Came a Gypsy Riding,
to plaudits from Michael Billington and other leading critics, while a new production of his Brecht translation
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
is on at the National Theatre. On Tuesday he joined Dermot Bolger, Patrick McCabe, Joe O'Connor and Colum McCann as a member of the Hennessy Hall of Fame, an award marking the achievement of major writers whose first work was published in
New Irish Writing
.

‘I was twenty,' he says. ‘I'd started writing at UCD but couldn't get into the student magazines. Then
New Irish Writing
published a poem about the death of my grandfather. And that really was the beginning of it. I knew what I wanted to do, although something in me knew that poetry was not going to be the medium. I remember I was paid £3.50, which in 1974 bought two steak dinners and a glass of wine.'