The appointment was this Easter Sunday and, despite the fact that many people were out of town for the Easter holidays, Quentin Tarantino fans have not missed the opportunity to see the director who knows the most about cinema live. The Coliseum theater in Barcelona was the place of pilgrimage this afternoon where the Knoxville theater presented his first non-fiction book, Film Meditations, a fun compendium of the films of the seventies that would influence his fruitful career years later. After a promotional tour that has taken him through Los Angeles, New York, London or Paris, today he had to visit the Catalan capital.
The public that filled the premises was very diverse. There were families with her teenage children, many foreigners and even an octogenarian who has professed to this chronicler her love for the director of Pulp fiction. “I’ve been following him since he did Reservoir dogs. He is one of my favorite directors â€, she commented with a beer in her hand.
Drinks and popcorn to liven up a show that prohibited the use of cell phones and which started with loud applause when Tarantino, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, went on stage to talk about the book with the critic Jordi Costa. “Thank you, thank you for spending Easter Sunday with me. I hope it’s worth it”, he blurted out euphorically before a dedicated audience that accompanied him for almost two hours –with intermission included– in a talk that was, above all, a declaration of love for the cinema that he saw as a child and that marked the beginning of the New Hollywood and the counterculture.
Without stopping to gesticulate, Tarantino has been grateful that his single mother took him to see adult movies as a child. Other times he went to the rooms directly accompanied by the mother’s boyfriend on duty, most of them black and athletes. “I watched a lot of disturbing movies, but that doesn’t mean I had a bad time because I knew those images were part of a story.” Of course, if there is a film that deeply traumatized him, it is Bambi. “It has destroyed many children for decades. I was not prepared for the forest fire or the death of the fawn’s mother, â€he explained to the laughter of those present.
This is confessed by the man who has never been averse to explicit violence in his nine works to date. From the next one, The movie critic, he did not want to go any further than that it will be about a film critic and it will be set in the seventies. The author of Inglourious Basterds has referred to how much he liked the Spanish horror films La residencia, by Chico Ibáñez Serrador, and La novia ensangrentada, by Vicente Aranda.
And of the two profiles of filmmakers who have saved American cinema: “the most anti-establishment group that made the most provocative films” with Sam Peckinpah at the helm, and the movie brats, the one who was trained in film schools and of which they are part Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma or Schrader. And he has praised, among others, Shark, The Hunter or Taxi Driver with a perfect Robert De Niro. “You see Travis through his eyes and you understand the character.” From his new profession, that of a writer, he hopes to profit by publishing more books. “Surely I will make another one about the eighties films and about the foreign ones that I saw when I was young”, he has encouraged himself. Definitely, a Sunday with the showman Tarantino that has been worth it.
