CINEMA SPECULATION

By QUENTIN TARANTINO Weidenfeld & Nicolson If you’ve ever watched a Tarantino film, it’s easy to guess the eras that influenced him as a filmmaker – the ’60s and ’70s.

In Cinema Speculation, the Pulp Fiction filmmaker does a deep dive into the movies he loves, with an engaging blend of childhood nostalgia, an analysis of filmmaking, stories from the sets of those movies and no-holds barred criticism too.

The book is written in his unmistakeable voice – if you’ve seen him interviewed, you’ll know he easily slips off into tangents and can effortlessly spout information and trivia about the most obscure films.

It’s unlikely to surprise anyone that young Quentin grew up on a diet of movies wildly inappropriate for children, and he loved it, even if he didn’t always understand all of it.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, his movie education began when he and his single mom, Connie, moved to Hollywood and he got to accompany her and various friends to the movies.

In fact, Tarantino credits one of his mom’s boyfriends, an aspiring screenwriter, for planting the seed of what would become Django Unchained (2012).

All in all, he references more than 900 movies of all genres in this 392-page book, including many well-known films and dozens of tantalising but obscure and long-forgotten ones, most of which are annoyingly hard to come by these days.

Fans of QT’s work hoping for his insights into his own films might be disappointed, as they’re barely mentioned at all, but there’s a lot to discover and enjoy in this book.