THE MOVIE LOVER.(Quenton Tarantino)(Biography)

When Quentin Tarantino goes to the movies, he sits in the front. Not in the first row, where he'd have to move his head from side to side to see what's happening in the corners, but the third or fourth row, where he can take in the whole screen and is aware of nothing but the screen. The trick is to exclude from his range of vision anything that would take him out of the movie, such as exit signs or wall sconces or just distance. He wants to be overwhelmed. Otherwise, what's the point? He might as well be watching television. Because he sits so far forward, his head is tipped back and his whole face is opened to the screen, as though he were receiving Communion--mouth slightly open, eyes wide, fist-in-a-sock chin pushing forward, large, pale forehead flickering with the film.

When Tarantino comes home at night after a late double feature, he sometimes goes by himself to the theatre that he's built in his house and watches a third movie. Then, at two or three in the morning, when he's really exhausted and about to fall asleep, he'll watch a fourth movie. There's a red plush sofa at the front of the theatre where he sits when he's alone, and about fifty red seats behind in gradated rows, for guests. The room is designed to look like an old-fashioned cinema, with wall-to-wall carpeting of a diamond-shaped design and velvet ropes supported by short brass poles. It is lit by a row of brass carriage lamps hanging by chains from the ceiling, and on the walls Tarantino has hung a series of photographs of a ruined movie theatre in Texas. On a table next to the sofa stand five or six piles of DVDs that he has recently watched or intends to watch soon: "The House with Laughing Windows," "Short Night of the Glass Dolls," "Fangs of the Living Dead," "Flavia the Heretic," "Beast of Blood," "Legendary Weapons of China," "Dirty Deeds," "Seven Bloodstained Orchids," "Mad Doctor of Blood Island," "Candy Stripe Nurses," "Private-Duty Nurses," "Women in Cages," "Spasmo." It's difficult to imagine what it must be like to inhabit Tarantino's mind, crammed as it is with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of filmed images--eyes narrowing, hands fumbling, guns firing, bodies falling, car chases, chases on foot, empty streets, facades of houses, trees blowing, open doorways, taps running, unmade beds, storms through windows, and everything else you could possibly imagine seeing in a movie. One of the reasons that Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second.

Before Tarantino began making movies, one of his heroes was Jean-Luc Godard. He loved Godard's unusual shots--the long takes, the long, long closeups. Even though he has now outgrown Godard, he named his production company A Band Apart, after Godard's film "Bande a Part" ("Band of Outsiders"), and before he filmed the John Travolta-Uma Thurman twist contest in "Pulp Fiction" he showed the eccentric, peculiarly enthralling dance sequence in "Bande a Part" to Thurman, so she could see what he had in mind. Other influences are even easier to spot: Godard would take a hoary American genre like a gangster movie and make it lighter, more playful, more self-consciously a movie, and he would interrupt the action with endless conversations.

Nonetheless, one fact that says a lot about Tarantino is that he prefers Jim McBride's 1983 remake of "Breathless" to the Godard original. The McBride version, in color, differs from the black-and-white Godard in exactly the ways you'd expect if you subscribed to all the oldest cliches about Hollywood and France: there's less conversation, more running. Godard's hero, played by the sublime Jean-Paul Belmondo, is affectless and cool, despite his love for the heroine, played by Jean Seberg. He's a cool dresser, he steals cars for the hell of it, and he's a cool killer, as amoral as a houseplant, killing existentially, for no good reason. Seberg is cool, too: she likes Belmondo more than she lets on, but she can live without him, and when she discovers he's a criminal she handles it like a pro, bluffing her way out of an interview with the police. When McBride's heroine, on the other hand, finds out that her boyfriend is being sought for murder by the police, she weeps. McBride's hero, played by Richard Gere, is somewhat cool, but not very. He's a sweet, clownish romantic who wears absurd, peacocky American clothes (a frilly red tuxedo shirt, plaid pants), and for whom driving fast is a crazy thrill. When he kills a cop, it's completely by accident, and afterward he's upset and scared. Tarantino says that he loved the McBride version because it was the kind of movie he could imagine making himself; and, indeed, the Richard Gere character is, in his sweetness and his clownish romanticism and his accidental crime, not unlike Clarence, the hero of Tarantino's script "True Romance." Godard was, in the end, too breezy, too detached, too motiveless, too delicate, too French to serve as a model. Godard said that when he saw a print of "Breathless" for the first time he realized that he'd made something completely different from what he intended: he'd thought he was making a gangster movie like "Scarface," but he discovered that he had in fact made "Alice in Wonderland." This is the difference between him and Tarantino, one of the differences that thirty-five years has wrought: Tarantino knows he's making "Alice in Wonderland."

"Breathless" is not the only remake that Tarantino likes better than the original. He likes L. M. (Kit) Carson and McBride's screenplay version of "The Moviegoer" better than Walker Percy's novel, which he found unemotional and dry. And he much prefers Adrian Lyne's 1997 "Lolita" to Stanley Kubrick's version, made in 1962. "I think Adrian Lyne's 'Lolita' is a masterpiece," he says. "When I saw it, I thought, boy, I don't know if Kubrick even read the novel. Kubrick manages to take that book and make this madcap comedy out of it that's actually pretty terrific. But the idea that you can do a movie about Lolita and not have one single, solitary disturbing image in it at all is crazy. It's fraudulent! I mean, to me he's missing the most fascinating part of the work, which is looking through a pedophile's eyes and actually going along with it."