THE road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Blake wrote, and for the last few decades no one in Hollywood has followed that road more assiduously than Quentin Tarantino. His movies are famous for their violence and bloodshed; their blaring soundtracks; their offbeat, Pinteresque dialogue; their startling performances from actors you had almost forgotten about; and their encyclopedic range of references to other movies, especially schlocky ones. He spent his formative years — the period when everyone else was in film school — working as a clerk in a video store, and it shows. His films are apt to allude to Godard in one frame and a movie like “Candy Stripe Nurses” or “Dead Women in Lingerie” in the next.

“Pulp Fiction,” his breakout film, which was released in 1994, when Mr. Tarantino was just 31, made him an almost instant hero among younger audiences and younger filmmakers, and subsequent films like “Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2” enhanced his reputation as someone who could break all the rules, making movies that were simultaneously stylish, exciting and knowingly cheesy, and somehow get away with it.

Mr. Tarantino’s newest, “Django Unchained,” opens Tuesday and has already picked up five Golden Globe nominations, including one for best director. It stars Christoph Waltz (the Austrian actor so memorable in “Inglourious Basterds”) as a German bounty hunter posing as a dentist in antebellum America and Jamie Foxx as a newly freed slave hoping to rescue his enslaved wife. It has all the Tarantino trademarks: a Mexican standoff, torrents of blood, long sequences of mayhem, a spaghetti western score, and a sly and surprising performance by Samuel L. Jackson, who has become for Mr. Tarantino roughly what Max von Sydow was for Ingmar Bergman. For good measure it also includes a hundred or so uses of the most common racial slur, probably more than in any film since “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.”

This month Mr. Tarantino, 49, was in New York to attend a benefit at the Museum of Modern Art, which has chosen to include his movies as part of its film collection. He was dressed for the occasion like one of the characters in his first feature, “Reservoir Dogs” — white shirt, dark suit, dark tie loosened at the neck — but over lunch at Fiddlesticks, a West Village bar that is one of his hangouts, his affect was much less cool. He was unable to contain his enthusiasm for movies, his own and just about everyone else’s. These are excerpts from that conversation. The language had to be cleaned up a little, but not as much as you might imagine.