A Blast to the Heart

(3 of 3)

There's never silence when Tarantino is in the room. This engaging, nonstop performer -- named by his half-Cherokee mother for the hero of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as well as for the half-breed (Quint) played by Burt Reynolds in Gunsmoke -- was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and moved to Southern California when he was two. Since then, it's been a movie-mad life. His folks took him to all sorts of films, then he went on his own. He seems to have remembered -- and understood -- everything he's seen. "He's probably the best video-store clerk there ever was," says Avary, who worked with him at Video Archives. "The world of video clerks will sadly miss him."

And now those films are memorialized in Tarantino's own. "People ask if my love of movies can be too much," he says. "What annoys me about the question is the snobbery; it treats movies like a bastard art form. Could a novelist ever read too many books, or a musician listen to too much music? Well, I totally love movies."

He loves acting too. Tarantino has small roles in his two features (and a ^ hilarious turn in the new comedy Sleep With Me). He knows what actors need and how to keep them percolating. "Quentin is a great collaborator," says Thurman, a creepy delight in Pulp Fiction as a woman convinced she's in control of her life and her men. "He is extremely clear about what he wants, but he's not close minded; he's no bully." Travolta says Tarantino trusts actors: "He lets you put all the icing on the cake. For Vincent, I could mock up the hair, the accent, the walk, the talk." The result is a deft portrait of a guy who moves warily and at his own slo-mo pace, as if he needed all his concentration just to stay alive.

There are plenty of subsidiary characters worth their own movie, like the suburban drug dealer (Eric Stoltz) and his trippy wife (Rosanna Arquette) -- a married couple for the strung-out '90s. Part of Pulp Fiction's fun is that memorable weirdos keep popping up in the second and third hour. Part of the movie's skill is that familiar characters reveal new depths. By the end, Jackson's Jules -- in a "transitional period" from L.A.'s baddest malefactor to Tarantino's idea of masculine sanctity -- has commandeered the film. But even Jackson, brilliant in the role, knows that all good films, like the Scriptures, begin with the Word."Films are a show-me medium," says Jackson, "and Quentin makes tell-me movies."

Pulp Fiction is Tarantino's show-and-tell extravaganza. It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in.