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In Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino was accused of glamorising violence. Now it's drugs. Sean O'Hagan meets the 31-year-old director whose twisted pop-action thrillers have made him the film stylist of the Nineties.

Quentin Tarantino is recounting one of the problems he has faced in his meteoric rise to Hollywood super-brat status. "Tristar were originally gonna distribute Pulp Fiction," he says, spreading his gangly torso over a plush hotel-room sofa, "but they had big problems with the scene where John Travolta's character shoots up heroin. I'm going, 'Look, guys, relax, it's going to be funny', and they're saying, `No, Quentin, heroin is not funny. A guy sticking a needle in his arm does not make for big laughs. 'In the end I just said, `You're gonna have to trust me on this one, guys. 'They didn't. I guess they just couldn't make the leap."

Tarantino is a film-maker who specialises in "making the leap". Scenes like the one described above, where humour and horror coalesce, make anyone since Sergio Leone, whose "Spaghetti Western" ouevre he has studied closely. "I like the idea that I'm taking a genre that already exists and reinventing it, like Leone re-invented the whole Western genre, "he elaborates, before adding, with his customary self-confidence: "I think I've taken on an established genre like the pulp thriller and made it challenging to myself and to my audience."

To this end, he has already succeeded in creating a contemporary generic hybrid which could crudely be termed the arthouse-action movie. In the process, he has also established himself, at the age of 31, as one of contemporary cinema's supreme stylists as well as the current crown prince of controversy.

If Tarantino specialises in conjuring up a hard, brutal world of imagination, in the flesh he is charming to a fault. He is so effusive - about films, film-makers and actors, mainly - in a distinctly trainspotterish way. One can see why he had problems at school. He has a gangling, awkward charm and an unselfconscious enthusiasm that is almost nerdish in aspect. Then there's his strange, drawling West Coast diction and the way he bounces forward and gesticulates wildly when he becomes excited about his subject matter.

His first film, Reservoir Dogs, was a lowbudget, high-profile début. It was shot entirely - give or take a few flashbacks - in a grim concrete warehouse, in which a bunch of bedraggled and squabbling crooks try to figure out what went wrong after a botched heist. If the basic idea was a simple one, the execution was anything but: the film's intricate structure, surreal dialogue and cast of low-life characters - each called after a colour and decked out in matching black two-piece suits - have made it one of the biggest cult movies of the Nineties. (The late Kurt Cobain even credited Tarantino on the sleeve of Nirvana's In Utero album. ) The violence helped, too. It is one of the few acclaimed films to have been refused a video licence in Britain. "I like that, " says the director. "It's done better in cinemas in Britain than anywhere else in the world, so the ban has been kinda cool in one way."

Reservoir Dogs is probably the first film in which one of the leading characters spends the entire movie slowly and noisily bleeding to death. Then there's the now infamous "ear-slicing scene" in which a suitably chilling Michael Madsen performs some brutal psycho-surgery on a captured cop while miming and dancing along to Stealer's Wheel's once innocuous pop song Stuck in the Middle with You. It has already become one of the key images of Nineties cinema and, more than any other scene, exemplifies Tarantino's talent for surreal, often disturbing, juxtapositions.

If Reservoir Dogs signalled the arrival of a formal iconoclast with a warped sense of humour, Pulp Fiction announces the presence of a singular, and singularly precocious, major-league talent. Over two-and-a-half hours and three separate but intertwining stories, Tarantino constructs a contemporary film noir that is, by turns, hilarious, surreal and shocking. And, like before, the formal and narrative subversion goes hand-in-fist with some resolutely hard-core imagery. The tone is set early on when Vincent and Jules, a pair of murderously funny hired killers, played by Travolta and Samuel Jackson, debate the erotic possibilities of a foot massage before beginning a particularly brutal hit. Later their boss, Marcellus, is bound, gagged and anally assaulted by a redneck cop. (All this in a film released through the Disney offshoot, Buena Vista. Walt is no doubt turning in his grave. ) Then there's the drug-taking. Travolta's shooting-up scene comes early in the film, kick-starting a surreal, chemically laced episode that culminates with Uma Thurman's character, character, Mia, overdosing on heroin that she mistakes for cocaine. When Tarantino shifts gear from romance to terror, he is in a contemporary class of his own. The scene's denouement is not for the faint- hearted, but its evocation of utter panic combined with drug-addled farce make it the most visceral moment in the film.

"That's my very favourite scene in the movie," Tarantino elaborates with an eagerness that suggests he is still utterly enthralled by the myriad possibilities of his chosen form." One of the things I love most about film-making is that you can make a left turn in the narrative and suddenly you're in a whole new movie. A comedy can turn into a nightmare in one scene and the audience are going, `Holy shit, man, what's happenin'?' And a lot of the time the characters are feeling the same. That kinda cracks me up." I ask him if he's ready for the inevitable accusations that he's glamorising hard-drug use. "I don't buy this whole idea that if you show someone shooting up, you're pro-heroin. That's as silly to me as the arguments I had the last time around about glamorising violence. I've said it before: violence in real life is terrible, violence in the movies can be cool. It's just another colour to work with. Now, the whole reason that the OD scene is harrowing and horrific is because I'm showing you what happens after all the thrills and spills. And, yes, there is humour lurking in even the most extreme situations. That's just a fact of life."

Nevertheless, I insist, he is portraying coldblooded killers - one of whom is a connoisseur of heroin - as sympathetic characters. And, his critics would argue, glamorising brutality by the gratuitous use of graphic violence. "I gotta say I can't agree. Surprise, surprise," he laughs. "What knocks me out is when people say to me, `Oh Travolta is so sweet, so loveable', and I'm thinking to myself `What?'. I mean, he starts off the film by blowing these guys away and not giving a damn."

Perhaps, I suggest, that's the whole point: his films blur the moral focus so much that people leave the cinema sympathising with killers and creeps and remembering the ultra-violence because it's so stylishly delivered. For the first time in the interview, Tarantino looks offended. "I happen to think my films are very moral," he says, after another uncharacteristic pause. "I don't necessarily try to make them as such, but they kinda end up that way. I mean, Samuel Jackson's character, Jules, has that big closing scene where he is altered and decides to give up the gangster life. His whole redemption is set up throughout the film, brick by brick, via a series of close shaves and narrow misses. I mean, Pulp Fiction is ultimately a film about forgiveness and mercy, albeit in a hard and brutal world." During a discussion of the crime-fiction "pulp" genre that inspired his latest film, I tell him that T. S. Eliot rated Raymond Chandler as one of America's greatest novelists. "Oh gosh, that's soooo cool," he says, thrilled in a way that only Californians can be. Then, without pause, he's off on a Chandler snippet of his own. "Pauline Kael said Chandler was an illiterate's idea of great writing. I don't agree, but I can see where she's coming from. Chandler could describe a police line-up better than anybody, but, you know, so what?"

Born and raised in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, which he describes as "a wharf community near the airport", Tarantino was steeped in film culture from an early age. As pubescent, he had already seen, with his mother's blessing, films like Sam Peckingpah's The Wild Bunch and John Boorman's Deliverance which may go some way to explaining the violence that runs through his own work like a coda. Later, his in-depth knowledge landed him a job in Video Archives on Manhattan Beach, where the staffs preference for the likes of Truffaut, Godard and Pasolini took precedence over the more mainstream tastes of most of their customers. Tarantino's personal taste is, to say the least, eclectic, an in-depth knowledge of European arthouse cinema co-existing in his over-crowded cranium with all manner of weird minutiae from post-Fifties pop culture.

Like John Waters or David Lynch, he is a connoisseur of the trash aesthetic. Pulp Fiction, although set in the present day, resounds with references from previous decades, from Dick Dale's Sixties surf music to the Fifties-style diner staffed by Hollywood lookalikes serving Douglas Sirk burgers and Dean Martin milkshakes. Then there's Jules whose speech is peppered with words like exactimundo (gleaned from his Seventies TV hero the Fonz) and whose dream is to "walk the Earth - like Caine in Kung Fu". This pop-culture worldview and an obsessive's devotion to film history informs Tarantino's work to a degree that has caused problems for some of his critics. True Romance, which he wrote and gave to Tony Scott, is self referential to an absurd degree, while Pulp Fiction divided film critics, many of whom thought it was too mannered to deserve this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes. His friend and fellow film-maker Roger Avarywhose début, Killing Zoe, was produced by Tarantino - told Vanity Fair "The one problem people have with Quentin's work is that it speaks of other movies, instead of life. The big trick is to live a life, and then make movies about that life."

I put it to Tarantino that maybe his films have an unreal quality and his characters, particularly the bad guys, an almost cartoonish aspect because he is imagining a world of which he has no firsthand experience. "Well, yes and no," he responds, unruffled. "I mean, Richard Burton didn't have to be a Welsh coal miner in order to play a Welsh coal miner. He drew on various elements: observation, imagination, the books he read and the films he watched. So, personal experience is only one element in a greater whole."

What is interesting here is that he compares himself not to another director, but to an actor. For a long time, while his first script languished in the reject trays of various Hollywood studios, Tarantino persevered with a spectacularly unsuccessful acting career. (He turned up on a recent episode of The Golden Girls as a rather unlikely Elvis impersonator. ) It is unsurprising, then, that he appears in cameo in both of his films. The experience also informs his working methods, which, given that he has had no formal training as a director, are more instinctive than most of his contemporaries. He is probably the only director working today who refuses to use an on-set video monitor to check takes. This is not just another measure of his seemingly unshakeable self-belief, but an understanding, gleaned from his acting days, that the day-to-day business of filmmaking has an energy that is diluted when a director spends too much time heeding a monitor rather than his actors. "Because it's the only area I'm formally trained in, I can talk to actors in their language about their sort of problems," he says. "I understand the whole process because I've been through it." This also explains his painstaking approach to casting. "I talked to damn near every actress in Hollywood about the Mia role, with the idea that when I met Mia, I'd know it. Uma came to dinner and I knew within minutes that she was Mia."

His choice of leading men, too, has been maverick and inspired. Reservoir Dogs helped to resuscitate the career of Harvey Keitel, whose profile had declined dramatically after the Seventies. He has since gone on to star in The Piano and to appear in Pulp Fiction. So, too, does Bruce Willis - who thought Tarantino's script was "like Shakespeare" and whose fee for Die Hard 2, according to Vanity Fair, "was as much as the whole budget of Pulp Fiction". Like almost everyone else, he is upstaged by the chillingly believeable Samuel Jackson - and his partner in crime, John Travolta - another overlooked actor whom Tarantino admires. If any film can exorcise the ghosts of Grease and Saturday Night Fever for Travolta, it will be this one - although Tarantino does make him dance the twist in one scene (which, the director insists, was written before the part was cast; originally Michael Madsen was offered the role). Hair extensions and a Reservoir Dogs suit, Travolta plays Vincent Vega with a sleazy cool that totally vindicates Tarantino's faith in him. "John and Sam Jackson were so electric together," the director says," that I actually considered making a whole bunch of Vincent and Jules movies, kind of like The Continuing Adventures of..."

Having hardly stretched himself in his last major role a few years back, in the less than engaging kiddy comedy Look Who's Talking, Travolta's career prospects were looking less than promising pre-Pulp Fiction. He has since been offered $5 million to play the lead in Barry 'Addams Family' Sonnenfeld's imminent Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. "He is," Tarantino states matter-of- factly, "one of the very best American film actors around. He was awesome in De Palma's Blow Out. I used to watch that film over and over and wonder why other directors weren't using him."

Blow Out is one of Tarantino's three favourite films, alongside Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Of the three, Scorsese's dark urban fable is perhaps the most obvious influence on his own work, a fact that both flatters and annoys him. "I make a point of not talking about Scorsese any more because everyone else does when they talk about me." I ask him if he can see why. "I guess so. I think it's unfair, but I understand it completely. I mean, here's the deal: Scorsese deals in the gangster genre; so do I. Scorsese makes violent films; so do I. Scorsese moves the camera around a lot; so do I. Scorsese uses Harvey Keitel, I use Harvey Keitel. Scorsese is a big film buff, I'm a big film buff. I mean so what? One guy even said, you use the f-word a lot: did you take that from Scorsese? Occasionally, they'll make a good critical analogy but mostly it's all too pat and easy. What matters is that the end result is so different."

This, of course, is true. It would be difficult to imagine a Tarantino film that touched on Scorsese's psycho-spiritual - read Catholic - terrain. Guilt and sin, thus far at least, are not part of the Tarantino palette. Instead, he has managed to create a celluloid world that is both new and emphatically now, but also strangely familiar - mostly from other, older films. We have seen these characters before but not talking like this. (At one point, Jules, whose jerri-curl hairdo places him in the blaxploitation era of films like Shaft, says to Vincent: "Let's get in character', just before they interrogate and kill a few petty hoodlums. Here, even the slaughter is laced with irony. ) "I wanted to subvert the Hollywood staples, but with respect, not in a superior or pastichey way," Tarantino says. "If you take a film like The Shining, I always felt that Kubrick felt he was above the horror genre, above giving the audience a real good scare. Now Godard, I always thought, was at his most engaging when he worked within a genre and ran with it the whole way to the moon. Breathless is a good example. Jean-Pierre Melville did it with the thriller genre, subverting it but with respect. I mean, a cinephile can watch those films and theorise about them but a regular guy who wants to see a good movie can get into them too. The thing is to tell a good story. My structures might be complex, but I tell very simple stories."

It is, however, the way he tells those stories that has placed Tarantino at the cutting edge of contemporary cinema. His use of dialogue and structure make Tarantino one of the most novelistic directors currently working in Hollywood. (One of his few heroes from outside film culture is J. D. Salinger.) "When you read a good novel," he says, when I ask him why his films have such intricate and non-linear plot structures, "and it starts in the middle of the story, then jumps back in time, you don't think it's any big deal. It's all part of an unfolding narrative. I'm not against a linear structure, it's just that it's not the only game in town."

From start to finish, too, Tarantino keeps almost total control of his vision, scripting, casting, directing and giving out detailed instructions to everyone from his editor and cinematographer to his costume designer and art directors. Since becoming successful, two of his screenplays have been turned into controversial films by other directors: True Romance by Tony Scott and Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone. He thought the first film was "wonderful" but had his screenplay credit removed from the second before the film even went into production. "I've never seen the film. That was just from reading the first half of the script. I mean, I really didn't want anyone to think I'd written some of the stuff that was in there!" He has no interest at present in directing other people's scripts. "That would be kinda scary," he says. "I'd probably want to rewrite it so much that the work I'd invest in it would be better spent on an original script. I have a lot of things I want to do and I want to do them my way." And doing things his way, of course, is what has made Quentin Tarantino's name. "I guess I do look at things differently," he says. "I don't think my films are hard to follow. The only thing that's required is that you have to commit to watching them, you have to engage with them totally. I don't make films for the casual viewer." How would he like to be remembered? "As a good storyteller. That's the bottom line. Ultimately, all I'm trying to do is merge sophisticated storytelling with lurid subject matter. I reckon," he says, grinning in the face of posterity, "that makes for an entertaining night at the movies".