Actor, writer, producer, director, Tarantino can tip his hat to all these roles he has played in the film industry. With his most recent flick Django Unchained being a must-see on the box, I thought it apt to travel into the strange and peculiar mind of the multi-award winning filmmaker, and hopefully come to an understanding what makes Tarantino tick.

I have always felt that Tarantino is somewhat of a blackjack dealer, he will allow you to believe you know what is going on or which cards you are being dealt, and then all of sudden, flips it on his head. Not with a clever twist where the hero dies, that makes you think “well I didn’t see that coming”. It is more like a silent Bullet train on Michelin tyres, that happens to be travelling down the M6 at one in the afternoon powered by Leprechaun gold, and knocks you off the motorway before you can say “Ezekiel 25:17”. He doesn’t just go round the houses to get to the end; he will go visit his Nana in Ayr first, stop off at Nandos, and then come back to the main characters (which by now you can just remember), to tie it up nicely with a big bow. The best example of this would be From Dusk Till Dawn to which he wrote the screenplay for, and his good friend Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Grindhouse, Once Upon a Time in Mexico) directed. You begin to watch the film and it develops a couple of layers of the plot, until you are knee-deep into a kidnapping scenario. You are at ease with that idea, and then suddenly the ‘villains’ (Clooney and Tarantino) become some sort of anti-heroes, who end up trying to keep themselves alive, but also the family that they have just kidnapped as well.

I think the wonderful thing that we can take from this kidnapping-cum-vampire movie is Tarantino’s fearless nature with his films. He isn’t scared to do more with it, he adds a layer and another and another, and just when you think you have eaten all the courses there are to eat… he orders you a second dessert. It must be his Italian blood; enough is never enough, who knows!

Before going any further, let us look back on January 1992 at the Sundance Film Festival. The first-time writer-director became an instantaneous legend with his debut of Reservoir Dogs; it was an outstanding birth of a refreshing and brilliant filmmaking mind.The film revolves around a jewel heist, but don’t worry too much about that because this is Tarantino’s world, and in this cosmic landscape you won’t get to see the jewel heist, it’s insignificant. It is fair to say that most directors, especially coming out of the 80’s with the Stallone, Arnie and Willis era, would be tempted to add a mass shootout scene to their film. This, however, is where his master-class in dialogue comes in to play, and through little bits of dialogue you paint the picture of the heist yourself. Although this is sometimes not first thought of as his best film, to me it has to be. Back where it all began.

The disjointed structure of Tarantino’s early films like Pulp Fiction, are homage to Jean Luc-Godard, as well as naming his production company ‘A Band Apart’ after Godard’s film ‘Bande a Part’. No doubt the man who we should thank for the influence he gave to Tarantino. Godard used jump cuts in his film Breathless- the film that launched the French New Wave of cinema and Tarantino calls one of his favourite films.

Tarantino’s use of dialogue is one of the key factors to his success. If you walk out of the cinema quoting lines out of a film, then the writer has done all the right things. His most memorable have to be ‘royale with cheese’, ‘say what again’ or ‘Ezekiel 25:17’(Pulp Fiction); depending on which way you remember it by, and lastly the diner scene in Reservoir Dogs ‘Like a Virgin’, it has to be the most random piece of dialogue written; closely followed by the ‘bag head men’ scene in Django Unchained, which comes close. One of the reasons why his dialogue is so good could be down to the fact that at one point in his life he considered becoming a novelist. There is no argument; his novelistic narrative technique bears a strong influence on his distinct filmmaking style.

So, what makes him so good at what he does? Is he a genius or did he strangle cats when he was young? Whichever way you look at it, the man is a movie-making machine. He may come off as slightly perverse, getting a kick out of some of the scenes in his movies, and you would think that he has shares in fake blood due to the amount he uses. But despite his films being ultra-violent and situated mainly in a land of the criminal underworld, he despises all these worldly characteristics. In some ways you could say it is his way of addressing the socialistic issues. Dickens had a pen. Tarantino has a camera. Dickens had ‘Pip’. Tarantino has ‘Marsellus Wallace’. The man has a unique lateral view of the world and has a gift for capturing that for our viewing pleasure. Whilst being as allusive as ever about his next project, I can safely say that his last two revisionist historical films (Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained) are dying for a third and who knows what it could be? Maybe a twist on the Romanov’s being brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks? They could come back as zombies and kill the Red Army… well there’s an idea! Does anyone have Quentin’s phone number? E-mail??