“Both take place in the woods, and both had me saying, ‘I gotta get out of here!’” I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven’s ‘Last House on the Left.’ So for me, ‘Last House on the Left’ and ‘Bambi’ are sitting on the f- shelf right next to each other.” He laughs. The only other movie I couldn’t handle and had to leave was at a drive-in in Tennessee. “I think ‘Bambi’ is well known for traumatizing children,” Tarantino says. “He seemed like one of the few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job, and consequently, their life,” Tarantino writes, adding that Thomas’ appreciative review of Robert Forster in the 1980 “Jaws” ripoff “Alligator” stuck with him through the years - leading him to cast the veteran actor in “ Jackie Brown.” (De Palma was the first to read Paul Schrader’s screenplay.) There’s even an appreciation of longtime Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas, whose enthusiastic reviews of exploitation movies captivated Tarantino as a young reader. Neither of these movies is mentioned in Tarantino’s new book, “ Cinema Speculation,” though the volume, the first work of nonfiction from the 59-year-old filmmaker, is full of references and reveries to other genre movies (Tobe Hooper’s slasher flick “The Funhouse,” the vigilante thriller “Rolling Thunder”) as well as musings on those more generally accepted as classics, including “Bullitt” and “ Dirty Harry.” There’s a chapter pondering what “Taxi Driver” might have looked like had Brian De Palma directed it instead of Martin Scorsese. These are films he hasn’t viewed since they came out, like the 1977 supernatural thriller “The Sentinel,” and others he has never seen at all (“perhaps for good reason,” he says, laughing) like “ Man’s Best Friend,” which has Ally Sheedy unwittingly adopting a genetically altered dog. Left to his own devices, Tarantino has been going through his horror movie collection, making a little stack to watch later that evening. It’s Halloween, and Tarantino’s wife, Daniella, and their two children are home in Tel Aviv, where the family spends part of its time during the year. It’s not “Hoarders” - there’s too much floor space - but, safe to say, the man will never want for entertainment. And we haven’t even ventured into the guest house, where Tarantino stores a vast collection of magazine and newspaper clippings. There are piles of film books and magazines in nearly every corner and on every surface, rows of vinyl record albums snaking across the carpeted and tiled floors, metal carts overflowing with VHS tapes just off the kitchen, revolving racks of comic books clamoring for attention. We’re settling into the library of Tarantino’s Hollywood Hills home, though pretty much any room in this spacious, multilevel mansion could technically qualify as a library. Jackson’s “Pulp Fiction” hit man would enthuse, “some serious gourmet s-,” served in a mug bearing the logo of his podcast “Video Archives,” named after the Manhattan Beach video store where Tarantino worked in his early 20s before becoming a filmmaker. Quentin Tarantino is brewing some coffee and it is, as Samuel L. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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