Quentin Tarantino, who is promoting his upcoming book “Cinema Speculation,” said the “most masculine experience” of his life happened at a Jim Brown movie with an otherwise all-Black theater audience, and he’s been trying to recreate that feeling ever since.
“The first time I ever heard, ‘Suck my dick’ was someone in the audience,” Tarantino said on Friday’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” recalling the moment 50 years later. “Being taken to a Jim Brown movie at an all-Black theater, that was the most masculine experience I have ever had.”
Tarantino said he was 8 at the time and already had a passion for Blaxploitation movies when his mom’s boyfriend took him to a double-feature of “100 Rifles” starring Brown. During the opening film “The Bus Is Coming,” he explained, the audience started groaning and someone hollered out the expletive.
“Either as a movie consumer or when creating movies for an audience, that goal of a Jim Brown movie on a Saturday night in 1972 is what I’m trying to recreate,” Tarantino told Maher.
“Rifles” starred Brown, Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch, and revolved around a bandit (Reynolds) attempting to escape the clutches of a local sheriff (Brown).
“Cinema Speculation,” Tarantino’s first nonfiction book, is due out on Nov. 1. Publisher Harper Collins said it’s “organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time.”
His book tour included a Jimmy Kimmel interview last week in which he answered a claim made by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, that the director stole Ye’s idea for “Django Unchained.”
“There’s no truth to the idea that Kanye West came up with the idea of ‘Django’ and then he told that to me, and I go, ‘Hey, wow, that’s a really great idea. Let me take Kanye’s idea and make ‘Django Unchained’ out of it,’” Tarantino told Kimmel.
“That didn’t happen. I’d had the idea for ‘Django’ for a while before I ever met Kanye.”