-== INTERVIEW ==-

ADRIAN WOOTTON: Could you tell me how black culture has affected you as a director and also with your scriptwriting?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: I kind of grew up surrounded by black culture. I went to an all black school. It is the culture that I identify with. I can identify with other cultures too; we all have a lot of people inside of us, and one of the ones inside of me is black. Don't let the pigmentation fool you; it is a state of mind. It has affected me a lot in my work. To try to point out would kind of be beside the point; you just see it; it is there. In the case of Jackie Brown, it really enabled me to be able to write truthfully, heartfeltedly and realistically, and to become the characters of Jackie Brown and Ordel. You have heard of method acting; I am a method writer. I become the characters as I am writing them. That is how I am able to get them to talk to each other. I am everybody. I am Louis. I am Melanie. The way I write my dialogue is to get them to talk to each other, and then they are doing it, so it is all coming from me. I know some of the people in my life I have admired the most were older black women. I have a lot of respect for them, so I was able to bring all of that into Jackie Brown. As far as Ordel, I was a little crazy; for around a year I just walked around as Ordel. I could not shake them. It was a spell I was under and I could not break it because I did not want the work to suffer from it.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: The obvious follow on from that is there is a great deal of admiration of your film viewing as well as about black culture, and with Jackie Brown specifically you have talked a little bit about your love of black exploitation movies, and obviously Pam's past in some of those terrific movies. I just wondered what you could say apart from casting Pam, because of your admiration for those movies, about the influence those movies had on the structuring of Jackie Brown, if anything.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: It is not a black exploitation film. Having said that, Pam is such an icon. To one degree or another, it is like casting John Wayne in a movie. You cast John Wayne in a Western, you are not just dealing with this unknown figure walking in there that you have got to learn about. For some audiences that will be the case, but that is not where I am coming from. John Wayne has got a whole past behind him, and his past is built up from these other movies. That is good baggage. Some baggage can be very, very good. By casting Pam, I did term this in my mind to a Pam Grier movie, but it was a Pam Grier movie with its feet on the ground more. That is not putting anything down, because Coffee is one of my favourite movies, actually; I love Coffee. Jackie Brown is a real human being. She is not a super bad momma - she is a kind of super bad momma to tell you the truth! - she does not get razor blades in her Afro, and she is not Kung Fu-ing people, and she is not pulling a sawn off shotgun and blowing a guy's head off. She is realistic; she is a real lady in those dire circumstances that I described.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: There was a lot of the use of the word "nigger" when it should have been a "mother fucker" or a "bitch" instead.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Well, that is your opinion.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: Do you want to just say that again to the mike?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Say that again, yes.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: What I said was there was a lot of the use of the word "nigger" when may be you could have thrown in a "mother fucker" or a "bitch".

QUENTIN TARANTINO: You are saying "may be" now. You said "should have been". (Laughter)

ADRIAN WOOTTON: There was a part of Pulp Fiction which I know we don't want to talk about, but you used the word "nigger" yourself, and I know here if any white guy says "nigger" to a black man, you had better put up or die.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: You'd do that to a good friend of yours?

ADRIAN WOOTTON: None of my good white friends call me nigger.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: They don't have that kind of relationship with you.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: No, we've got a great relationship.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: You might have a very great relationship, but you don't have that kind of relationship.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: I think we have that respect for each other where we aren't going to go there.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Then you are not that kind of guy. Sam Jackson is, and I was in that movie.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: I still don't agree with it, because I know a lot of people - almost every black guy I spoke to who saw the movie was, like, fantastic film, brilliant dialogue, but, hey, he isn't going to get away with that.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: I do. (Applause)

ADRIAN WOOTTON: I notice a little bit of Oprah Winfrey in Pam Grier, not in any physical sense but in the way she has the two voices; the white voice she used when she is in mainstream society, and the black voice that comes up sometimes. Is that something that was difficult for you to write, as someone who is marginal to black culture but who grew up within it?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: No, that is not difficult for me to write at all; that is the easiest stuff for me to write in the whole script. We all have different voices. Blacks in America in particular have two voices. It is called "getting a job". The way they are with their friends or their family is not the way they present themselves in the work place. I am not talking about everybody. I am not making sweeping generalisations here, but by and large people can move in and out of dialects. We all do that. I definitely have a different voice when I am angry. If I am going to fuck you up, I am going to have a completely different voice than I have standing here right now. We all have that, and that is highlighted by a different dialect going on inside of a white community.

ADRIAN WOOTTON: What do you actually like about black exploitation movies, because I remember them being very vulgar, two dimensional films with good actors who could be much better, a lot of stereotype actors in stories. The best things were the soundtracks. You seem to find something more alluring in them. What is it?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: I think there were some terrific films in there. There was a gigantic, wonderful black cinema movement going on there that actually just as it was becoming a viable force was cut down. It wasn't allowed to have its growing pains. What was sad about it was the black community was actually supporting it, but it was the black intelligentsia, and the moral leaders that kept putting it down all the time. So it appeared to be not getting any support from within, when actually it was getting a lot of support from people going to pay to see the movies.

Some of them were junk. They were all paid cheaply, and most of them were exploitation. I don't think there is anything wrong with exploitation obviously, from my movies. They were crime thrillers, or gangster films or horror films and stuff, but there was also family dramas. There was Five on the Black Hand Side, and Corn Bread Earl and Me, and there were all kinds of flics going on.

What did I like about them? In particular, if you break them down, especially to the gangster genre, for instance, they had a vitality. They had a certain kind of vitality that really only lurid paperbacks had in the way that they dealt with things.

There was nothing like them before they came out. They were completely, utterly unique in look, in feel - like you said, the soundtrack - in the complete embracing of black culture. They presented a black world in a way that had not been seen before, except if you look at the old coloured movies where Lionel Jeffreys is the cowboy walking around. They were going to say it out loud: "I am black and I am proud" kind of world. There was nothing like them before. When they left, there was nothing to take their place. They really left a void.

One aspect I cannot agree with you about. There were not really a lot of great directors doing these movies. They suffered cinematically often times, but one of the things that proves their power is that some of them could be cheaply made, but at the same time they still have that power. They still have this in-your-face-can't-be-denied quality as an overall genre. There were good directors in their. Michael Campus did The Mat and did a very good job with that. Jack Kill is a terrific director, and there are other ones: Jonathan Caplin did Truck Turner and did a good job with that. That was one of the things I could bring to it. I think I am OK. I can bring some cinema into the mix.