The American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has landed this Holy Sunday in Barcelona as part of his European tour to present the book “Meditations of cinema” (Reservoir Books), a meeting with followers in which he has confessed that the film that, against all odds, The most “traumatized” in his childhood was “Bambi”. “I couldn’t imagine that something like this was going to happen, that they were going to shoot Bambi’s mother. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t see it coming, hence the shock. I had seen the poster before and I assumed that everything would be happy between little animals and not that it would become that dystopian reality in which Bambi is left an orphan”, has recognized the director of contemporary classics such as “Pulp Fiction” or “Kill Bill”.

And that the filmmaker from Knoxville, Tennessee, did not grow up in cotton wool and, as he has told the audience at the Teatre Coliseum, His mother let him watch films recommended for adults only from a very young age. “Yes, as a child I saw a lot of disturbing images, I suppose. But I enjoyed it. I didn’t really understand what was happening in scenes like rape or torture, but I understood it from the context,” explained Tarantino, whom the general public often associates precisely , with violence. In his first non-fiction book, he also reveals that he saw his first two porn movies at the cinema when he was only 14 years old or that his mother’s boyfriend, an African-American, took him to a cinema where he was the only white man and where a man lived. hectic pass of the movie “Black Gunpowder” by Jim Brown.

“It was possibly the most masculine experience I had ever been a part of.“, he recalls in the book in reference to the uproar with which the scenes were celebrated in the stalls, a sensation that he has always wanted to “recreate” for others from his cinema. At his only presentation in Spain of “Meditations on cinema “, in which it has not been allowed to take photos or record videos, Tarantino has arrived punctually, with a white shirt and socks, trainers and jeans. His intervention, in which he has delved into his love and constant reference to the cinema of the seventies , the so-called “New Hollywood”, has been accompanied by the viewing of famous scenes from classics such as “American Graffiti” or “Dirty Harry”.

In the talk, he did not avoid referring to his controversy over the criticism of the new movies from the Marvel and DC universe and he pointed out that he would have “liked” them, had he been twenty years old, see their comics brought to the big screen, although now they are no longer “interested”. Tarantino has explained that if the 70s of the last century changed cinema, it was precisely to treat the viewer “as an adult”. “The Second World War had already passed and the viewer no longer wanted to be treated like a child, they already knew what life was about,” he pointed out. The public, made up of fans of the American willing to pay between 82 and 94 euros for admission, has also heard the reading of one of the last chapters of the book from the voice of Tarantino himself.

In the play, in which he fantasizes about what “Taxi Driver” might have been like if Brian de Palma had been its director, and in which He also names Spanish titles such as “La Residencia” by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador or “Átame” by Pedro Almodóvar, Tarantino flirts with both autobiography and film criticism. Precisely, his next film, “The movie critic” (The film critic), revolves around that figure. “There’s a lot of speculation about who it’s based on. And yes, he’s a real critic, but he’s not known and… and I’m not going to tell you more,” said Tarantino, who, laughing, added that it won’t be a “revenge story”.

The book, which has been number one in The New York Times, he especially stops at the starkest and limited-budget films from the years of his sentimental education, from “Defense” to “Dirty Harry”, passing through “Taxi Driver”, “The escape from Alcatraz” or “The ex- prisoner of Korea”, the film that has been named the most times in Barcelona. “Cinema Speculation”, in its original title, was presented in the US before his short European tour which, prior to Barcelona, ​​passed through London and will also take the director of “Reservoir Dogs” to Berlin next week.