A Magnificent Obsession

One evening not long ago, the director Quentin Tarantino picked at a Greek omelet inside a Los Angeles diner and suddenly found himself at a loss for words and unwilling to explicate. This is astounding, of course, and has probably never happened to him before. Normally, he will talk until your ears bleed and you beg for mercy, and he had already said much tonight.

He had said that for breakfast he typically alternates between Special K and oatmeal; that one of his first orders of business upon getting out of bed is "taking a piss'' (and this noted, an elderly woman sitting nearby barked, "Could I please ask you to keep it down?"); that Kill Bill Vol. 2, his latest movie and the follow-up to last year's hack-'em, slash-'em Kill Bill Vol. 1, is "much more emotional and much more tragic, with much more depth''; that he became so feminized during the writing of the Kill Bill series, with its supersexy woman-warrior main character, that "now I can buy a girl a dress, and she'll wear it and like it, not because I bought it but because I developed good taste''; that one time, feeling in need of redemption for a bad deed done, he seriously thought about cutting off a finger ("The knife wasn't poised . . . but I did have it out"); that "if anybody were to break into my house, I'd kill them, no questions asked, no nothing"; and that "if I went to prison, I would not be butt-fucked. Let's say it's Mike Tyson. I can bite his lip off. Bite his nut sack off. I could rip it open. Those are the things that I could do. And I would do them."

'He also said he has a set of lavender sheets for his bed but that the ones on the bed now are light blue.

So he said many different things on many different subjects with no trouble. And yet he found himself stumped when it came to talking about Uma Thurman, the star of the two Kill Bill movies as well as of Pulp Fiction, and the question of how it is that she operates as his muse, which is what he often calls her: "my muse.''

"I don't know,'' he said, a hand poised to pull on his long Tarantino chin. "It's just this cool connection that happened while we were doing Pulp Fiction. I mean, von Sternberg had Marlene Dietrich, Hitchcock had Ingrid Bergman, Andre Techine had Catherine Deneuve. It's a special bond that I'm proud to have, and hopefully, one day, people will reference me and Uma like they do the others. But the thing about it is, it just kind of is, and there are certain things I don't really want to understand subtexturally. I just want it to be and do.''