The films of Quentin Tarantino’s childhood

Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with QT and PTA on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,’ she informed the New Yorker some years later. I suppose that’s one accolade the pair will have to agree to share: conversation so unstimulating it undoes all the good effects of hard drugs.

Part of his problem – as the reader of Cinema Speculation quickly notices – is that, as well as being one of the pre-eminent filmmakers of his generation, Tarantino is also an unreconstructed anorak: a self-confessed ‘brash know-it-all film geek’. And as with anoraks, the love he has for his subject is a selfish kind of love.