-== JACKIE, OH! ==-

Quentin Tarantino jumps up from the table, throws his whiskey in my face, slams me against a wall...

Well, no, not exactly. He didn't literally jump up from the table, throw whiskey in my face, or slam me against a wall--but he did accidentally spill a bottle of fizzy water in my lap. So I'm suing him for $5 million.

Other than that, lunch with the battling auteur turns out to be a decidedly docile affair. Despite his recent penchant for punching out producers in L.A. restaurants (for which he really is being sued for $5 million), the 34-year-old bad boy of independent cinema seems to have mellowed recently. Even his new movie, the twisty caper comedy Jackie Brown, which Miramax is opening Christmas Day, sounds like it's been decaffeinated, at least compared to the so-hip-it-hurt mayhem Tarantino unleashed in 1992's Reservoir Dogs and 1994's Pulp Fiction.

"It's a love story," the director says of the long-awaited Pulp follow-up. "A love story with older people and an older sensibility."

It's also the first film Tarantino has adapted entirely from someone else's material--Rum Punch, the 1992 best-seller by Get Shorty author Elmore Leonard. And while it does bear certain unmistakable Tarantinoisms--dialogue peppered with pop-culture references, corkscrew twists in the chronology, a killer '70s soundtrack--some hardcore fans may be alarmed by its shocking lack of violence (only four murders in the entire movie) and its kinder, gentler story line. Even Tarantino calls it the least Tarantino-esque film he's made so far.

Pam Grier, the director's latest '70s career restoration project (see story), stars as the title character, a 44-year-old flight attendant who gets caught smuggling drugs and gun money for a sleazy, rinky-dink arms dealer, played by Pulp's Samuel L. Jackson. Robert De Niro has a small role as Jackson's none-too-bright ex-con sidekick, Bridget Fonda plays Jackson's beach-bunny girlfriend, and Michael Keaton is an ATF agent trying to squeeze Jackie into ratting for the government. As Jackie's love interest, there's Robert Forster, yet another acting refugee from the 1970s (Avalanche, The Black Hole), playing a fiftysomething bail bondsman who helps the heroine scam her way out of her jam.

"It's definitely not Pulp Fiction II," Tarantino says during lunch in West Hollywood earlier this month, where he's been editing Jackie all fall. Suffering from the sniffles and exhausted from the last-minute push to finish the film, he seems more subdued than his usual speed-talking, hyper-gesticulating self--at least for the moment. "We screened it in Seattle, and people were like, 'This is not what we thought it would be.' But I felt I'd gone about as far as I could with my signature shooting style, so this one is at a lower volume than Pulp. It's not an epic, it's not an opera. It's a character study. I knew I didn't want to go bigger than Pulp, so I went underneath it."

BIGGER THAN PULP IS SOMETHING OF AN OXYMORON. No independent film this decade has had more impact, spawned more imitations, or raked in more cash ($210 million worldwide). Pulp's box office breakthrough, which helped trigger the '90s indie phenom, turned Miramax into a major player, saved John Travolta from talking-dog movies, and even managed to give Bruce Willis a touch of art-house class. And, of course, it elevated Tarantino into geek god-dom, making him the idol of thousands of goateed film students and video-store clerks around the globe.

In short, it turned Tarantino into his own tough act to follow--which may be why it's taken him three years to get behind the camera again. A number of potential projects have crossed his path. At one point he talked to Warner Bros. about a big-screen version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., "with George Clooney as Napoleon Solo and me as Ilya Kuryakin," he says. But mostly he has spent the après-Pulp period concentrating on other matters. Like acting in a film made from one of his earlier screenplays (1996's vampire comedy-thriller From Dusk Till Dawn, in which he really did get to costar with Clooney), script-doctoring on Crimson Tide, goofing off with Dave and Jay on late-night TV, and turning up in the tabloids with girlfriend Mira Sorvino ("The actress of her generation," he calls her). In fact, the only actual directing he's done over these last three years was an episode of ER and a segment in Miramax's famously dreadful Four Rooms.

For a time, it looked like Tarantino was in danger of becoming a professional celebrity, a sort of skinnier, nerdier Orson Welles, more famous for his talk-show patter than for his groundbreaking filmmaking. The overexposure helped spark an anti-Tarantino backlash in the press. "That's one of the reasons I didn't do TV for a year and a half," he says, still a bit touchy on the subject. "I wanted the celebrity thing to go away. Critics couldn't see the work because I was in the f---ing way, so I gave up my membership in the celebrity club. I'll renew it when I need to sell a picture again."

Actually, it was renewed for him last fall, with the publication of a juicy little volume titled Killer Instinct--the book that made Tarantino go medieval in that restaurant in L.A. A dis-and-tell account of the filming of Natural Born Killers--which Tarantino wrote (and Oliver Stone rewrote)--by one of the film's producers, Jane Hamsher, it portrays Tarantino as obnoxious, duplicitous, and arrogant, as well as a bad speller. Hamsher even quotes her producing partner, Don Murphy, as saying that he would "openly celebrate Quentin Tarantino's death."

What happened next, on Oct. 22, when Tarantino bumped into Murphy in an Italian eatery in West Hollywood, is a matter for the judiciary to decide. Murphy claims that Tarantino slammed him against a wall and began hitting him so hard his watch flew off his wrist. Tarantino has admitted hitting Murphy--in fact, he gleefully pantomimed the entire incident on The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show last month--but claims he merely "bitch- slapped" the producer three times ("A little bitch slap don't hurt nobody," he told Wayans). Police were called to the restaurant; Tarantino was ushered into a cop car (where, Murphy says, he mockingly blew kisses at him) and was nearly carted off to jail--until Miramax cohead Harvey Weinstein, who was dining with Tarantino, managed to persuade Murphy to drop the charges.

Tarantino is no longer very talkative about the fight "because of the lawsuit," he says. But Murphy--who's described in Hamsher's book as 6 foot 2 and 220 pounds--is a regular chatterbox on the subject. "I didn't say I wished Quentin Tarantino was dead," he explains. "I didn't say I wanted him dead. I just said I'd celebrate his death." In other words, he meant it in a nice way.

WHILE MURPHY'S LAWYERS GOT BUSY PREPARING THE $5 MILLION SUIT, Tarantino returned to the relative comforts of Jackie Brown, a project that's long occupied his mind. In fact, he first contemplated making it before Pulp. "I read [Rum Punch] in galleys," he recalls, "and it just kind of presented itself to me as a low-budget anti-Hollywood action picture." But film history beckoned, and Jackie went into turnaround while Tarantino taught the world what they call Quarter Pounders in France. Then, last year, he picked up Punch again and got that old familiar feeling. "That same movie I saw years before came back in my head."

Of course, the director has tinkered a tad with Leonard's original text. For starters, he changed Jackie's race from white to black--mostly, he says, because he's always wanted to work with Grier and wrote the screenplay with her in mind. Sam Jackson, though, offers another insight that could explain the switch: "Quentin wants to be black," says the actor. "He watched a lot of black exploitation flicks growing up. He has a lot of black friends. He has an affinity for black culture. And he likes to write black characters. He's like my daughters' little white hip-hop friends. They're basically black kids with white skin."

In any case, the rest of the casting required no further race changes. De Niro and Keaton took salary cuts for the chance to work with Tarantino, who made Jackie for a mere $12 million, while Fonda was chosen partly because she looks the age of her character ("You know, around 33, living off guys her whole life, starting to get kinda old," elaborates Tarantino). Forster, meanwhile, still can't believe he got the part. "If I can just get 10 percent of what Travolta got out of Pulp Fiction..." he prays.

Filming started last summer around L.A. (another change from the book, which is set in Florida). The shoot was intense (Tarantino sometimes gets so excited during a scene, he can't help shouting out verbal high fives in the middle of a shot) but exceptionally social. Many cast parties were thrown, many Mira sightings reported. "He was more confident in what he was doing than he was during Pulp," says Jackson. "But it was basically the same old Quentin."

QUESTION IS, WILL QUENTIN GENERATE THE SAME OLD BOX OFFICE? Frankly, probably not. Although Miramax has been running trailers for Jackie before Scream 2--and plastering New York and L.A. with cool black-and-white billboards of each of its cast members--there's been surprisingly little buzz over the film. Part of the problem is that so few people were allowed to see it before Tarantino finished editing on Dec. 4; for a while, there was even some doubt whether it would be ready in time for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards this month. "We felt like, if we can get it done in time for the critics, great," he says of the last-minute crunch (he ultimately met the critics' deadline). "But if we can't, they can have their little contest without us."

Of course, nobody really expects the film to do anywhere near Pulp-size business. Even Tarantino's longtime producing partner, Lawrence Bender, is low-keying his expectations: "There are only so many times you can make a movie that changes the world," he points out. Still, a lot is on the line here--namely Tarantino's reputation as the most innovative, ingenious, and envied director in all of indie-hood. Surely some performance anxiety is to be expected. Isn't Tarantino sweating at least a little?

"You know, there's an insult in that question," he says quickly, starting to wave that bottle of fizzy water around ominously. "It presumes that I care what audiences think about my movies, when my whole career has proven that I don't care, all right? I mean, if I was scared, I wouldn't have done Pulp Fiction the way I did, okay? I would have cast Daniel Day-Lewis instead of John Travolta.

"I've built a career in which fear doesn't exist," he says, talking faster and faster, sounding more and more like the old Tarantino. "If nothing else, I think I've proven that. All right? Okay?"

Whatever you say, Quentin--just don't hit me. *