“I READ, IN A BOOK about Bette Davis, that anybody who does an interview while drinking alcohol is a damned fool. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s right! What have I been doing my whole career?’ ’’ Quentin Tarantino offers me a glass of red wine from a recently opened bottle that’s about half-full when I arrive at his house way up in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking the green-ridged canyons on a hot August evening. ‘‘I hope you’re a damned fool, too!’’

Seated at a table by the pool behind the large and rambling home he bought in 1996 when he was making ‘‘Jackie Brown,’’ Tarantino is in baggy jeans and a brown hoodie, and because he is the ultimate auteur movie geek — I’ve never met anyone with such an encyclopedic knowledge of film — we are soon talking about our mutual affection for the critic Pauline Kael. A huge influence on Tarantino, Kael championed a kind of high-low trash-art aesthetic that was inclusive of both old-school foreign auteurs (Max Ophüls and Satyajit Ray) and new mavericks (Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma), while disdaining the polite, better-behaved American cinema of that era; we agree that she was so much more vital and interesting in the 1970s than in the 1980s. ‘‘The movies just weren’t up to snuff — she was better than the movies,’’ says Tarantino, a believer that the latter decade was among the worst for American film. But, he adds, ‘‘one of the weird things looking back at the ’70s reviews is that you can’t believe how mean she was to magnificent movies. She’s so rough on Don Siegel for making ‘Charley Varrick.’ ’’

Now, you might not think “Charley Varrick” is ‘‘magnificent’’ (if you think about it at all) but Tarantino’s adolescent passion moves you closer to wondering: Did I miss something? Tarantino has been too busy working on his new opus, ‘‘The Hateful Eight,’’ to watch many new movies in the last year, but he offers, along with more wine, snapshot opinions about a few of his filmmaker contemporaries. David Fincher? ‘‘Even when I don’t like his movies I walk around thinking about them for a week or so.’’ Wes Anderson? ‘‘ ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is not really my thing, but I kind of loved it. The fact that I wasn’t a die-hard fan before made me even more happy that I could finally embrace him.’’ Judd Apatow? ‘‘His audience is getting smaller and smaller but I think he’s getting better and better.’’

‘‘The Hateful Eight’’ will screen on Christmas Day in a few select cities — in 70 millimeter as a roadshow presentation complete with an intermission — before opening wide in digital theaters in January. Tarantino is obsessed with the creamy grain of 70-millimeter film, so much so that he has arranged for 100 theaters worldwide to be retrofitted with Ultra Panavision lenses so the movie can be displayed as he intended. ‘‘I’ve been very on-edge the last three weeks,’’ he says, looking relaxed as the canyons around us recede into blackness.