• Festival de Cannes.Quentin Tarantino: "I prefer any time before mobile phones"
  • True crime: The tracks of Charles Manson: 50 years of a summer of sex, pop music and blood orgies

You saw weird and spoke fast. Hawaiian shirt (or worse) with the patterned face of Bruce Lee and a loud "I've been waiting all day to meet you, Luis" by way of greeting. Why? «Because you are the last» . Here, a laugh. That said, you saw fast and spoke weird.

Quentin Tarantino (Knoxville, 1963) welcomes us in Rome at the hotel that crowns the famous and crowded staircase of the Spanish Steps. He does so while moving his arms, serving himself water and asking for the movie's pass in Madrid a day earlier in the Doré room. «I care what the critics say, of course, but what justifies all this is the expectation that you are able to raise. I remember thinking about the films of my favorite directors weeks before they were released and all my effort now is to cause the same reaction. I want to be desired, ”he says as a presentation and a new laugh.

To place ourselves, the one that opens on August 15 comes with the ninth movie label of Quentin Tarantino . And that means two things: a) that Kill Bill 1 and 2 counts as one and b) that with the next one, the tenth one, he retires (he has said for active and passive that he will only do 10). "Yes, it is so," he adds as a single and succinct comment. One more laugh.

For the rest, Once upon a time in ... Hollywood , in addition to a wonder, is, and so it is presented from the foreground, as an anomaly in his filmography. Let's say we are facing the most emotional and, if you let me, sincere of how many films your director has signed. Without a doubt, the strangest and most intense.

Without regard, Tarantino abandons much of the style marks that have configured the scope of the Tarantinian adjective and that so many henchmen have produced. The film runs in parallel between the erratic work of an actor ( Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton) fundamentally erratic, and the delirium of life of an actress ( Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate) who aspires to simply life. In between, a double or specialist ( Brad Pitt as Clift Booth) as a true catalyst for an adventure that speaks precisely of how some bodies replace others and how dreams are carried away by their corresponding nightmares. And basically, the murder perpetrated by Charles Manson in August 1969, 50 years ago.

Why this effort to review the past? In recent times we have seen two other great directors do it, Cuarón with Roma and Almodóvar with Pasión and gloria. Is it a coincidence or is there something in the environment? Without a doubt, there is something. I could not define it, I do not know what it is exactly, but I do think that whenever there is a movement in the cinema it is because there is something in the atmosphere that attracts the artist. When the expressionism in painting began, it wasn't because a few got together and said, "Come on, let's start painting weird paintings." There was in the air the germ of a creative idea that hatched. With the independent violent cinema of the early 90's, where I appeared, Robert Rodríguez also appeared with El Mariachi . It was like a movement but none of us knew what the others were doing. Same corrupt Lieutenant , from Abel Ferrara ... But there has to be a reason ... There will be more than one. They leave all at once and it seems a movement, but in reality it is a moment in time. One possible reason is that there was a reaction to the conservative repression of the cinema of the 80s. We were simply fed up. And this global melancholic attack, where does it come from? I don't know, but it is true that it exists. Perhaps it is a reaction to something what is being lost? Cinemas are closed, movies are produced by televisions ... Maybe. We may be wondering how much longer we will last, how long this can last and if we can continue doing things as we like to do them. The cinema lives the end of an era. I remember that in Cannes he said that he preferred any time without mobile phones ... Continue in those, is it one of those who thinks that the previous cinema was better? (Laughter) Before everyone rolled with celluloid and entire sets were built instead of a piece on a green screen. Now you try to do the same and they call you a purist. No, this is simply how things should be done, the cinema. Not only is it much more fun but it also takes much more talent. I see it really apocalyptic ... Things have deteriorated in a short time. Recently I saw The Island of the Cut Heads , by Renny Harlin. I have not seen her. And the movie is fine, but seen today becomes fantastic. It's from 1995, I'm not talking about the 60s. They built all that! They shot those action scenes that really had to be shot! There were no digital effects. It had to cost a fortune. Nowadays, even high-budget movies don't have time to go around with those bullshit. Something has been lost. In digital all those artisanal processes that the films required to capture an image in a beautiful way and do it so well that, after going through three duplication processes, when arriving at the screen of a cinema it was still spectacular, are lost. There are not many people able to achieve it. That is an art and is being lost. And then there is the disappearance of the halls ... Yes, in the year 69 the movies could be seen in double session. It is impossible not to feel that something is lost. Sessions like Margot Robbie sneaks in to see herself in Érase ... Yes, she enters to see the mansion of the seven pleasures , which, precisely, I saw when it premiered. He would be six years old. It's funny, I remember knowing Dean Martin because he was a fan of his films with Jerry Lewis. He was one of the greatest celebrities in the world at that time. Everyone knew him. My parents took me to see the movie and yet I remember that the one that excited me was Sharon Tate (the role of Margot Robbie). His interpretation is very funny. He is a kind of awkward secret agent. He had a gift for light comedy, his physical gags were very funny. Seeing a beautiful girl stumble, fall without losing her poise, I was excited. I also remember that the movie theater fell with the fantastic joke with which the film ends. When I left the cinema, as I liked it so much, I went to the poster to see who the girl was. In the movie we have used the same photos and the same poster. I don't know, all that can only be lived in a movie theater. His movie is set in 1969, the year everything happened: the man arrived at the Moon, the murder of Sharon Tate ... Hollywood was formatted and people met the fear. «It was a sign ... Yes, most ignored it. Everyone was too busy filming, drugging, fucking and spending money, ”Peter Biskind wrote back and forth with Manson's murder… Yes, people stopped hitchhiking for fear. But the relevant thing is what happened thereafter in the cinema, in the 70s. During World War II, no country, except Germany, cared to make films, as is logical. After World War II, when those countries regained their balance and were able to make films again, the audience had become much more adult. And those movies reflected that maturity. I think, for example, of Rossellini and Bergman. Or in Kurosawa too. However, in the United States we were still committed to making youth films, dedicated to children. We insisted on immaturity, while the rest of the world had matured. But the Americans watch those movies and think, "If they left me, I could do that." It was an unsustainable situation and in the mid-70s some movies began to enter that area. In 1967 you have The graduate, Bonnie & Clyde, In cold blood ... Also Twelve of the gallows that, in its own way, tickles the system .... It is the beginning of the new Hollywood. It is clear why the year 69 This movie comes after the Weinstein case (it is the first one that Miramax's producer doesn't take care of and at the time Tarantino sang a mea culpa for not having reacted as he should have done) and his cinema is now watched with a magnifying glass. Recently an article in The Guardian invited to erase Tarantino for the treatment that women receive in their cinema. How do these criticisms affect you? As for the issue of violence against women, it seems to me a false debate and misrepresentation. The misrepresentation pisses me off. I screwed that they put me in the debate of violence against women. My work does not play any role in that discussion, they simply see me as a symbol. They know it's a false debate and they don't care. As for the issue of violence, I disagree with it but it interests me. You may like it or you may not like it. It may seem good to you to tell it that way or you may think you shouldn't have done it. If people and the media want to talk about it, I think it's perfect. Talk then. Yes, it means that a conversation is created, which is something worth commenting on and exchanging opinions. In the end, one of the most important things a movie can do is to create a conversation around it, because it happens less and less often. 25 years ago Pulp fiction and insists on retiring to the next one. Do you feel old? It's funny because I think I've always done the same thing. Above all, in the dialogues. I put the characters to talk to each other and I simply transcribe it as if it were a stenographer. I think, yes, that over time I have improved, I have become sophisticated. My method is very similar. I may have written more at night and now I do it by day, but I don't think that affects creativity. What has happened is that, although I have always had a very healthy ego, my work has become much more literary than it was at the time of Reservoir Dogs . From the title of Érase ... to a good part of his references cinephiles, everything speaks of the spaghetti-western ... I am fascinated by the way Italians do gender, be it spaghetti or war movies. The Italians reinvented the classic western and taught us to look at it with new eyes. That is the key: look again. Directors like Leone and Corbucci started as movie critics, then screenwriters, then second units. They were as in love with cinema as the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. I like the operatic quality they gave the genre. That slight surrealism. The first book I read about spaghetti westerns was titled: The Opera of Violence. I think I've been trying to do just that all my career: the opera of violence. How did you know the cinema of Joaquín Romero Marchent (he is the director of one of the films that the character of DiCaprio rolls in Europe)? I'm a fan of Joaquín so much like Rafael, his brother. I had to choose a Spanish-Italian co-production and I chose one of my favorite directors. It could also have been Horror Express [Panic in the Trans-Siberian] , by Eugenio Martín. Do you already know what the other Spanish references are? I imagine that Johnny Madrid, the character Timothy Olyphant plays, is a reference. They came to rob Las Vegas [ Las Vegas, 500 million ], by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi. It is the Spanish Don Siegel. It appears on a movie poster.

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