 THE next time you watch a Quentin Tarantino movie, take a look behind you. The director himself may be watching you. “One of my favourite things to do at weekends when I have a film playing is to go and watch it in all the different areas,” he explains. “I love going to these cinemas and watching the audience reaction. It’s a really cool thing to do.” We were talking at Liverpool’s Hope Street Hotel shortly before he went to a screening of his latest film, Death Proof, at FACT in Liverpool. “I will certainly be watching the audience there,” he announced. Liverpool might seem an unusual location to launch his movie in the UK: “I just wanted to go to places I didn’t know,” he says. “I don’t know Liverpool at all, although of course I know of its pop culture history, and I wanted to visit working class towns.” Tarantino has become one of the big Hollywood names despite directing only a handful of films. Death Proof is his fifth. In the US it was released as a double bill with fellow director Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, both films trying to emulate the cheapo shock movies which toured the so-called “Grindhouse” circuit of low-rent cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s. But the double bill failed to attract big audiences and now Death Proof has been released as a single movie with 20 minutes of deleted footage restored. “Well, I had to cut my film back so much to make the double bill that this is not such a bad deal,” says Tarantino. “But I knew that in most places it would be playing by itself so you are getting the script that I wrote with this full version.” The film stars Kurt Russell as a stunt driver who gets his kicks by killing girls with his specially-adapted car, one that has been constructed so that for the driver it is “death proof”. He finally meets his nemesis in three women – including real life stunt woman Zoe Bell – who fight back when he tries to crash their car. The climactic scene features a nail-biting car duel with New Zealander Ms Bell clinging to the car bonnet while her car is constantly rammed by Russell’s vehicle. It was, allows Tarantino, a dangerous scene to shoot. He insisted the cars travel at real speeds which were often up to 100mph, with the camera car going even faster. “There was real danger and Zoe could have died if things had gone wrong,” he said. “But Zoe is one of my best friends so I was conscious for her safety. One of the happiest days of the shoot was when we finished the scenes with her on the car hood.” He shot the sequence himself. “I never use a second unit although that is how most Hollywood movies are done. I can't understand why a director would make an action film and then have someone come in and film the action scenes. You know, if I am making a porno film I am not going to let you direct the sex scenes!” He also makes one of his occasional acting performances (as a barman) although he is not a keen actor any more. “I used to be very serious about acting”. He actually studied to become an actor, “but I have completely lost the bug. I have only acted in other films because directors insisted, but for this film I knew what I wanted from the guy I was playing and I knew I could do it. “I can say I was proud of my performance in the film Dusk to Dawn. That was a wild and crazy vampire movie and I was able to make my character a child-like villain and give a serious performance of a psychotic schizophrenic.” He still worries about reaction to his movies, and like all directors has to go through a certain process. “It is usually shown to the producers first, then some sort of audience to gauge how it plays and make final little cuts. Then it is shown to the taste-makers, media people who might want to do a news feature for television or a magazine article. We tend to show the film to critics just a week before opening.” Last night, a Liverpool audience had the privilege of seeing his movie before its official release at the end of next week. Tarantino is currently working on his next project, a film set in Nazi-occupied France, but there may not be an awful lot of Tarantino films to come. “I don’t intend to direct past the age of 60,” says the 44-year-old director. “Then I will become a novelist in my twilight years.” Cinema lovers flood into city to meet their idol >>> | 
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