-== THE CONFESSIONS OF A VIDEO STORE==-

by Jan Gradvall

As an added ingredient to the festival's wide and interesting selection, the director has been asked to pick his own ten favourite films, which will be screened during the festival. Jan Gradvall has taken a closer look at them.

Quentin Tarantino, 31, never went to film school. Instead Tarantino's education in film comes from working in a video shop for five years, something that also clearly characterizes his films and screenplays.

The whole unstructured and unsophisticated chaos that is a video shop, where there is only a small distance between Bresson and Bruce Lee, with all that time to kill behind the counter which makes you run action sequences and splatter in slo-mo, are reflected in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

The shop Video Archives, where the 20-year-old Tarantino began working, has moved from Manhattan Beach in California to Hermosa Beach a couple of miles away, but the owner Lance Lawson is still there and the selection in the shop is still as eclectic as ever.

In the magazine Entertainment Weekly Lawson tells of how the 20-year-old high school drop-out Tarantino first visited the shop in 1983. "He came by, a typical film freak. We began to talk about films and got into a discussion about Brian De Palma. Four hours later, we were still talking."

Tarantino came back already the next day - this time the subject of conversation was Sergio Leone. After two weeks, during which Tarantino came by to talk on a daily basis, Lawson offered him a job. Tarantino only got $ 4 an hour. But, what was more important, he got to watch an unlimited number of films.

The manager of the video shop Lance Lawson also describes Tarantino's personality. He was almost always dressed in black, drove a silver Civic, ate at Denny's and Jack in the Box, read an extreme amount of thrillers and comics, loved Elvis and The Three Stooges and always celebrated his birthday by going to the movies. Rent True Romance on video and watch the sequence at the beginning once more - that is Tarantino's autobiography.

In Grand Street Magazine you find a very entertaining interview with Tarantino by Dennis Hopper. Hopper and Tarantino speak a lot about those years in the video shop. Tarantino tells of how he managed to build up a cult-following around Eric Rohmer in the entire Manhattan Beach area, by always recommending Rohmer-films to everybody who entered the shop. He and the rest of the staff used to watch films all day long on the shop's big-screen TV: "Wild stuff, Roger Corman, women-in-prison movies. People would say, `What's this? Oh that's Pam Grier."

The black actress Pam Grier plays the lead in Coffy, one of the favourite movies that Tarantino chose for the retro section. In a film dictionary the film is described in the following way: "Intense, edgy, extremely violent black exploitation thriller that makes a star out of the incredibly attractive Grier."

Quentin Tarantino's reason not to chose Jean-Luc Godard's original Breathless for the retro section, but the remake mocked by film school purists with Richard Gere in the lead instead, is also quite typical for a video store manager. "Why pick a black and white movie when it is also available in colour?"

Still, Tarantino is enough of a Godard fan to name his production company Band Apart (after Godard's new wave thriller Bande à part from 1964), but if you watch Breathless without prejudice you will realize why Tarantino actually prefers the remake. The manuscript is packed with Tarantino details: in the remake Richard Gere is obsessed by Jerry Lee Lewis and constantly reads the Silver Surfer comics. (Compare Pulp Fiction, where John Travolta spends the entire film with a Modesty Blaise book in his hand.) Jim McBride, who directed the remake of Breathless, is also a competent director of thrillers. Four years after Breathless he made the excellent The Big Easy.

Robert Altman's much discussed disaster The Long Goodbye, considered to be sacriligeous by certain Raymond Chandler fundamentalists , also contains a number of Tarantino details. Altman does not give a damn about 50's Chandleresque period details, instead he goes for whopping sideburns, unsophisticated ostentatiousness, glaring daylight (none of those cool Chandleresque blinds); in other words exactly the 1970's of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction pastiche.

Roger Ebert made an interesting point in his review of the film: "Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye attempts to do a very interesting thing. It tries to be all genre and no story, and it almost works. It makes no serious effort to reproduce the Raymond Chandler detective novel it's based on; instead, it just takes all the characters out of that novel and lets them stew together in something that feels like a private-eye movie."

Compare with Reservoir Dogs: The screenplay of the film resembles a cut-up pulp thriller, with a mixed-up chronology and all the central scenes taken out. Instead Tarantino focuses on the characters, the details, things that are irrelevant to the plot.

The choice of Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More is given. Leone is a master when it comes to focusing on the characters, however at the end of the film you have no idea of what it was about. During the scene where Lee Van Cleef lights a match on Klaus Kinski's neck, you can almost hear Quentin's husky laugh from the back of the movie theatre.

That Quentin Tarantino's greatest role model among filmmakers may turn out to be Howard Hawks may come as a surprise to many. Two of the ten films that Tarantino has chosen for the Stockholm Film Festival are films by Hawks. The part of Tarantino's audience who usually connect Quentin Tarantino with Dario Argento and John Woo, or even the Japanese action series Kage No Gundo with Sonny Chiba in the lead (Slater/Tarantino watches a triple- bill Sonny Chiba on his birthday in True Romance), may not even know who the ancient Hawks is.

Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was incredibly multi-facetted and made masterpieces within virtually every conceivable genre. He made gangster movies (Scarface, 1932), war movies (The Dawn Patrol, 1930), westerns (Red River, 1948), film noir (The Big Sleep, 1946), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953), science fiction (The Thing From Another World, 1951, which often is credited to producer Hawks), action (The Crowd Roars, 1932) not to mention comedies: Bringing Up Baby from 1938 and His Girl Friday from 1940, both screened at the festival, both remain two of the funniest films ever made, and could be watched over and over again.

In the screenplay for Pulp Fiction the instructions say that the actors in the opening scene at the diner should read the dialogue His Girl Friday-style, that is very, very fast. Uzi intense dialogue has become a Tarantino trademark.

When Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday he instructed Cary Grant and the other actors to make their lines over-lap, to make it sound as if they were all speaking at the same time. Hawks also put four microphones in the chaotic newsroom where the film is mainly set (the plot in His Girl Friday is identical to the one in The Front Page), everything in order to capture the chaos created when journalists talk over each other.

A film historian has even clocked the the verbal fireworks in His Girl Friday to 240 words/minute, which really is faster than the human ear is able to discern; 110 words/minute is the norm. Hawks also instructed his actors to physically rush through every scene, in order to make the hysterically stressful atmosphere stronger.

Even the Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo contains a number of scenes which have clearly inspired Tarantino. Hawks almost always preferred to keep the camera at eye-level; this in order to be able to focus on details essential to the character, how he or she lights and smokes a cigarette, for example. Look at Bogart & Bacall in The Big Sleep or John Wayne in Rio Bravo. Hawks way of telling is very much to the point. During his entire career Hawks supposedly never used a flashback in the plot. Several of his films are also very violent.

In a recent article in Interview magazine, where Tarantino discusses film with up and coming directors Roger Avary (Tarantino was involved in the making of his debut Killing Zoe) and Lawrence Bender, Tarantino says: "What I'm doing is like in The Big Sleep, where there's a guy waiting outside the door for Bogart, and Bogart makes this other guy go out. The guy is, like, `I'm not gonna go out', so Bogart shoots him in the leg. He's still not going, so Bogart shoots him in the hip, in the hand. Finally, the guy goes out and he gets shot, all right? It's tough stuff, and that's what I'm trying to do with my violence. It really annoys me to see an action movie like Patriot Games, which is just so obvious in its structure that you can feel the committee behind every choice the hero makes. And then they end it in this awful way where the hero (Harrison Ford), who has been fucked in the ass for the whole first half, gets in a fight with the villain, who falls down and impales himself! Anyone who makes a movie that way should go to movie jail and not be allowed to make movies for a while. The only reason to do a revenge movie is to have the hero kill the guy at the end; otherwise, it's like watching a Zalman King movie and never seeing any sex."

Quentin Tarantino's indignation, and way of reasoning, is very similar to the way Howard Hawks was thinking before making Rio Bravo, and was his very reason for making the film. Howard Hawks and John Wayne went to see High Noon - a very popular and critically acclaimed western - and were really pissed off. Hawks and Wayne were upset that High Noon portrays a sheriff who is so afraid of the `bad guys' that are coming to town to settle matters with him, that he spends most of the movie running around asking the people in the village for help.

The much more brutal Rio Bravo became Hawks' reply to High Noon. To quote an American film encyclopedia: "Hawks and star Wayne both felt that a frontier professional would never seek help from those he has been assigned to protect, and that a sheriff should face danger only with those skilled enough to do the job and take care of themselves - amateurs would get in the way."

Tough guys (tough in a cartoonish way) also dominate the rest of Tarantino's favourite films. Nicholas Ray, Marlon Brando, Jean-Pierre Melville (whose La Samourai contains one of the coolest suits ever seen on film, according to Lloyd Cole) and, naturally, Brian De Palma.

It is particularly funny that Tarantino has chosen the sadly forgotten surveillance-thriller Blow Out. Pauline Kael claimed it to be "probably the best of all American conspiracy movies", but apart from that Blow Out has until recently remained far, far out at the back on the dustiest shelves of the video stores. Maybe it is because the lead is played by John Travolta, who in between 1977 and 1993 was a symbol for everything hopelessly uncool. However, after watching Pulp Fiction no one will ever question the talent that Travolta has actually previously shown in both Saturday Night Fever, Perfect and above all Blow Out.

Quentin Tarantino can put anyone in a good mood. Give him a finger - or an ear - and he will take more than anyone could ever imagine.