Unkindest cut

Quentin Tarantino is, you suspect, only half joking when he says that "I'm getting sick of people monkeying around with my work". Twice it's happened. His last film, Kill Bill, was deemed too long to be released in one go, and duly appeared as Kill Bill Vol I and Vol II. Now his much-touted double bill with fellow director Robert Rodriguez under the umbrella title Grindhouse has been sliced in half and put out in cinemas outside the US as two separate films.

If he's really annoyed, Tarantino isn't showing it. And it would be difficult to disguise as he's sitting before me - and an audience at City Screen in York - larger than life on the big screen.

The American film-maker behind Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown is discussing his work with cinemagoers around the country via satellite link after Death Proof, his half of the Grindhouse project, opened the TCM Crime Scene festival in London.

He's talking about his career, so the splitting up of the Grindhouse experience - a double bill, plus trailers, in the style of 1970s US exploitation guns-and-girls films - is bound to be top of the list of queries.

"Kill Bill didn't bother me, probably because it was so successful. I don't think the four-and-a-half hour version would have been that successful," says Tarantino, as animated and excitable as ever.

The cut of Death Proof in the Grindhouse double bill was 30 minutes shorter than the version showing in British cinemas. "I wouldn't have been able to cut it back if I didn't know I could put it back later," he says. "UK and Australian fans say it sucks having two movies, American fans say they're getting half-an-hour more than we did."

Thus proving that you can't satisfy everyone all of the time, although Tarantino's sleek and stylish thrillers with their smart dialogue and grisly violence have shaken and stirred filmgoers since the ear-slicing sequence in Reservoir Dogs sparked off a furious debate about screen violence.

Death Proof has Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike, who uses his reinforced "death proof" car to stalk vehicles carrying innocent girls, then murder them using his car. He's a serial killer whose lethal weapon is his vehicle. Tarantino calls it his serial killer movie, his slasher movie.

"The starting point was the idea of making a slasher film but not just a guy in a mask with a knife or machete," he explains. "Reservoir Dogs was my own crazy version of a heist film, Death Proof is my slasher movie."

The self-confessed movie buff didn't want to use computer effects, preferring to do the stunts for real. So, in the climactic car chase, that really is stunt woman and actress Zoe Bell clinging for dear life to the bonnet.

Even Kill Bill, with its complex fight scenes, wasn't faked, apart from erasing some of the wires using CGI. "When it comes to physical action, it's pointless to me to use CGI if you've grown up watching all the kung fu films and seen guys doing all that stuff.

"I'm not excited by digital effects when you've seen people do it. But doing action is very hard work. After doing this and Kill Bill, I know if you're trying to do standout action scenes you're talking about at least six weeks to do it."

Kurt Russell is the latest established actor to be given a career makeover thanks to a Tarantino film, following John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and David Carradine in Kill Bill. He had someone else in mind - Mickey Rourke, according to reports - during the writing but that didn't materialise. "I had to think of someone else. You get tunnel vision and, when it doesn't work out, the whole world is open to you and even your movie is different."

Robert Rodriguez was playing music from John Carpenter films, Escape From New York and The Thing, on the set of his Grindhouse production Planet Terror - and both those films starred Kurt Russell, planting his name in Tarantino's mind.

"The thing I didn't realise 100 per cent when I was casting him was that he's been acting since he was a little boy. His Stuntman Mike is a different breed of man who doesn't really exist any more and used to work in the film industry. I would think about people who are dead or too old to play him, like Cameron Mitchell and William Smith. Kurt has worked with all these people. Because he was involved in it, he understood the Hollywood that Stuntman Mike knows.

"The minute he read it, he liked it. I said to him 'you have a real rogues gallery of characters you've played and I want to add a special one to your shelf'."

Death Proof contains the long dialogue passages that are not only unusual in movies today but typical of Tarantino's style. The characters give him the dialogue, he says. "They sing together like a group but don't always have the same rhythm. It's my gift. If you have a good handle on your characters and just get them talking to each other, I feel I'm like a court stenographer jotting it down."

One thing you might notice in Death Proof is the director's predilection for bare feet. They feature in several scenes. Tarantino comes over all bashful at the suggestion he's a foot fetishist. "I'd say legs and ass get equal time," he says.

What's not in doubt is that he puts actresses centrestage, whether it's Uma Thurman's Bride in Kill Bill or the chicks in cars in Death Proof. "It was conscious in Kill Bill because I was creating these warriors, it just sort of happened in this new one," he says. "It's the first script since Reservoir Dogs that I came up with a strong story idea and just sat down and wrote it. Because of that, one of the coolest things was the storytelling. I didn't know until I wrote it how it would play out. The female characters just took over."

His films show off his movie knowledge with references and harkbacks to other movies and styles. He's currently writing his Second World War movie, Inglorious Bastards ("a Dirty Dozen kind of thing"), and would like to make a western one day.

"I'm really proud of the whole thing about me being connected to movies. It's really cool if you let the world know you are a film geek and watch movies and that cinema is part of your process. It's not possible to see too much cinema."

Death Proof (18) is now showing in cinemas.