Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

Director Quentin Tarantino on the set

Tarantino on the set with actress Margot Robbie

Tarantino on the set with Leonardo DiCaprio

Tarantino on the set with DiCaprio and Brad Pitt

Tarantino at Cannes surrounded by DiCaprio (left to right), Margot Robbie, and Brad Pitt

ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD                C             

USA  Great Britain  China  (161 mi)  2019 ‘Scope d:  Quentin Tarantino         Official site

History may not look back too kindly on Quentin Tarantino, who exhibits a flair for flash, but missed decades of opportunities to actually offer something of consequence to say.  Instead his breezy style of macho mayhem fits the profile of overly privileged movie nerds raised on television and video games and B-movies, never having the patience to read books, so any introspective element is lacking in his films, as is empathy.  But his prolific use of the n-word throughout his career is clouded in highly stylized artificiality, as if that makes it OK, with a tin ear for criticism from those who took offense, not to mention his longtime partnership with movie producer Harvey Weinstein, whose near instant fall from grace was shocking, the producer of all of his films until now, the target of current litigation from endless scandals of sex abuse from using his position over multiple decades for sexual favors, resulting in dozens of actresses crying rape, with Tarantino acting dumb, pretending he had no idea.  Despite several films written for strong women (with roles that are almost interchangeable with men), Tarantino also has a tendency to underwrite female characters in his films, to treat them as if they barely exist, where bimbos and airheads pass for the norm.  This film is no exception.  For a guy who survives on dialogue and stereotypes, with an unadulterated love for grotesque violence and comic book revenge, he’s made a niche for himself and survived for decades, receiving adulation and acclaim around the world, bolstered by the extraordinary work of actor Samuel L. Jackson, who has built a career starring in Tarantino films, not to mention Pam Grier and Uma Thurman, but the pillorying of his work has not yet officially begun, as his films work best in the moment, and once that moment has passed they may not stand up so well to the passage of time, as most are overly smug, lightweight fantasies that will begin to date themselves, with each new generation wondering why people thought this was so cool, as there’s always a targeted group that is the butt of the jokes, accentuating derogatory comments that are equally offensive and obnoxious, which may grow more apparent over time.  The targeted group includes women, people of color, and foreigners from other nations, with very few viewed in a positive light, which sounds very close to the mindset currently occupying the Oval Office at the moment, with Tarantino perfectly in synch with that mentality, where his insults are like Trump tweets, seemingly boxing himself in.  Make America Great Again?  This movie was made with that same demographic in mind, where his once upon a time motif fondly recalls the nostalgia from a similar era, as there’s barely a person of color anywhere to be seen, as if designed for the exclusive pleasure of white people.  Only 6 when this supposedly takes place, Tarantino’s recollections produce a whitewashed 60’s that looked nothing like this (Where is all the soul music?  Was anyone listening to this particular Neil Diamond song?), as Los Angeles is a town of diversity, where his vision of the times leaves out essential specificity that actually defines this period of time, so it’s not really a love letter to Hollywood or the times, more like an internalized message to the director himself, perhaps filling some therapeutic need, where making a movie about Patty Hearst will be next, recast as THE BAD SEED (1956).  Nonetheless this colorful movie fantasia is shot on glorious 35mm in ‘Scope, immersed in neon signs, vintage cars, radio jingles, movie posters, iconic music, and meticulously recreated TV shows, including the dumb ads, yet also tinged with intentional racial slurs, this time laced in a toxic undercurrent of animus towards Mexicans, Asians, and “the fucking hippies” (always said with a sneer).            

There are multiple parallels in place here, all triggered by the idea of an aging Hollywood star whose time has come and gone, which certainly fits movie mogul Harvey Weinstein who’s been expelled from the Academy as damaged goods, but may also be applicable to the director himself who may view his career coming to an end as well (allegedly one more in the works), with many believing this plays out like his swan song.  Meant to be a feel-good fantasy set in the nostalgia of the year 1969 as the rebellious counterculture movement (no sign of it here) was coming to an end, Tarantino saves for last his own take on the hideous Charles Manson murders that rocked Hollywood, defined as the culminating event that many believe brought that era of idealism and hope prematurely crashing to a close, a kind of punctuation to the political assassinations that took the lives of the era’s greatest hopes.  This trip back through memory lane features a couple of good ‘ol boys in the lead, Leonardo DiCaprio as aging Western star Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his stunt double, both joined at the hip, seemingly going everywhere together, where the deal is if you hire one, you hire the other as a kind of bonus.  From the world of movie sets, a kind of protected bubble that thrives on fantasy, the story is, as the title suggests, more of the same, a kind of preposterous revisionist history that Tarantino has come to exemplify, from the Nazi’s in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) to slavery in Django Unchained (2012), and now the Manson derelects.  In each, evil is perceived as an abomination that needs to be eradicated from the earth, much like the epic Bible rant that Samuel L. Jackson goes on in Pulp Fiction (1994) before he blows somebody away, using fake scripture to morally justify murder.  That may be, in essence, the theme of Tarantino movies, creating a revenge scenario as a moral cleansing, ridding the world of evil incarnate, gleefully depicting murders onscreen for laughs and public entertainment, where the world is just an extension of a comic book fantasy.  This film never gets out from under that bubble, but in Tarantino-land that’s what we’ve come to expect.  Starting out as another day on a movie set, we quickly learn Dalton made a name for himself on the popular TV show Bounty Law, known for bringing in wanted outlaws returned as corpses for the reward money, where his notoriety grows by the body count accumulated in the course of his job.  These black and white episodes, viewed as boxed squares on a ‘Scope screen, are balanced by insipid commercials of the time, including a live TV interview with both Dalton and Booth on the set of the show.  Quickly moving to the present, the self-pitying Dalton is haunted by the thought that his best days are behind him, missing his lines, screwing up on the set, embarrassing himself before the crew, something he once thought unthinkable, tearing up the inside of his trailer in a momentary lapse of reason, but he recovers, with the help of a precocious young 8-year old actress named Trudi (Julia Butters) who calls him out on being called a “pumpkin puss,” yet ends the day in glory, with everyone thrilled with his work, while Booth returns home in an old beat-up Porsche that he whizzes around the hills to the music of Deep Purple, Deep Purple - Hush - YouTube (4:25), living out in the valley somewhere in a trailer on what looks like unused land behind a drive-in theater with his pit bull, which is miraculously well-trained to the sounds of his owner, easily one of the film’s biggest surprises, becoming a bonafide star by the end, while the dog food labels are a hoot.

While Dalton is suffering a midlife crisis, Booth is the picture of calm reassurance, giving his hung-over partner a pep talk before dropping him off on the set, making easy eye contact with a flirtatious female hitchhiker on the street, but he’s not going her way, heading instead for the Hollywood Hills to fix Rick’s TV antenna that may have come off its moorings in the night.  Finding a tool belt with a special pocket for a beer, he hops onto the roof in three leaps without a ladder, an eye-catching move that draws oohs and aahs from the audience, followed almost immediately by another moment when Brad Pitt pulls his shirt off and suns himself on the roof (more murmurs from viewers), showing he is completely at ease with himself and the world.  From that vantage point up on the roof Booth watches a seemingly innocuous occurrence, as some hippie guy pulls up in a broken-down ice-cream truck and knocks at the house next door, turning out to be Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) in search of Terry Melcher, a record producer known for the California sound, but he’d moved out some time ago, as the new occupants are newlyweds actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), seen dancing in her room to “Good Thing” by Paul Revere and the Raiders, Paul Revere And The Raiders Good Thing - YouTube (3:01), one of the groups Melcher produced, and her husband, legendary filmmaker Roman Polanski, director of the hugely successful Rosemary's Baby (1968).  Manson leaves without incident, but sets the stage for what happens later.  Meanwhile, Booth recalls earlier days, including a flashback of what originated his reputation as a wife-killer, revealing an ominous moment just before it happened, alone on a boat calmly aiming a harpoon at his shrill, nagging wife, eventually cleared of all charges, but that hasn’t stopped some from refusing to work with him.  While waiting on the set of a shoot, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), who was starring at the time as Kato on the TV series The Green Hornet, was talking some shit about how he would have ripped apart boxer Cassius Clay as his hands are registered as lethal weapons, drawing a snicker from Booth, who is quickly challenged to a fight, showing his prowess, displaying fighting dexterity when he throws Lee into the side of a car parked nearby, doing damage to them both, with Zoë Bell the stunt coordinator outraged at what she sees, screaming profanities afterwards, as it’s her car, firing Booth on the spot.  She’s the wife of Kurt Russell, who hired Booth as a favor to Dalton, who then becomes an unseen narrator later in the film, which is a rather clever transition, as are the scenes of Dalton imagining he got the Steve McQueen part in THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), which are seamlessly (and digitally) juxtaposed into the movie.  This happens again with Sharon Tate, almost always seen with a perpetual smile on her face, with no worries whatsoever, on a natural high apparently, walking into an afternoon screening of a rather mediocre Dean Martin film she’s in, the last of the Matt Helm series entitled THE WRECKING CREW (1968), using her wannabe celebrity status to get in for free, propping her feet up and clearly enjoying watching herself onscreen, which includes interacting with actual clips of Sharon Tate.  Later we see Polanski and Tate partying with Michelle Phillips, Mama Cass and other celebrities around the pool at the Playboy mansion, with Steve McQueen bellyaching about how he’s not Tate’s type, as she seems to prefer little short guys that look like they’re still in high school.  The irony, of course, is that McQueen was invited to the Tate/Polanski residence the night of the bloody massacre, but never showed up.

All this is basically a backdrop for what seems like a harmless visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Bounty Law was shot, with Booth finally picking up that hitchhiker, Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), who sells him an acid cigarette for 50 cents, quickly finding the lot inhabited by hippies and weirdos, given a near surreal look, almost like a zombie movie or a Twilight Zone episode, utilizing the macabre reputation surrounding the Manson family to heighten the suspense, as they’re inhabiting the place, but acting strangely, overly paranoid about receiving visitors, always sensing trouble.  When Booth persists about visiting the aging George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who owns the place, it all gets very creepy, as this group of misfits doesn’t like confrontation, viewing it savagely, as it does with all authority, preferring to live by their own rules.  This extended scene takes place at a snail’s pace, but establishes the central thread of psychotic hatred lurking on the periphery, mostly out of sight, hiding under a pretentious banner of hippie peace and love, but exceedingly dangerous.  After watching Dalton make a guest appearance on a The F.B.I. TV show, Al Pacino makes a cameo as an unbelievably weird and overly enthusiastic producer/agent Marvin Schwarz, who wants Dalton to star in spaghetti westerns, suggesting he can turn his career around from being the heavy that gets killed in movies to the hero that does the killing, but he’d have to spend some time in Italy, which for Hollywood actors is the kiss of death, as low as you can get, believing it’s proof your career is over.  After a successful 6-month run, however, and a new Italian wife (Lorenza Izzo, almost nonexistent), the two old friends decide the time has come to part ways, getting good and drunk, with Tarantino pulling off one of those signature shots with a sequence of different marquees lighting up, matched by his love for the look of old movie houses and vintage cars, giving the film a retro look.  The way it all plays out in the end begins innocently enough with Booth smoking that acid cigarette in Dalton’s home, figuring what the hell, taking his dog for a walk while Dalton goes ballistic when a group of hippies pulls up to the cul-de-sac in front of his house with the muffler smoking noxious fumes, ordering them to get the hell out of there, figuring they got lost and were just a bunch of jerks.  When the Manson bunch finally get their act in gear (depicted here as buffoons), it stretches credulity, even for a fantasy, set to the psychedelic music of Vanilla Fudge, Vanilla Fudge - You Keep Me Hanging On - YouTube (7:25), becoming a wildly over-the-top exaggeration of fortunes gone wrong, much like the heist gone wrong story that started it all in RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), with Booth’s dog turning into Rin Tin Tin on steroids, nearly singlehandedly wiping out the entire Manson crew, turning deliriously violent to the point of absurdity, with one drunk guy and the other tripping on acid somehow managing to save the day, and the world, from the Manson mayhem that so demoralized Hollywood for a while, petrified by the vicious scope of their aims, stunned by their depravity and total absence of remorse.  It was an end to innocence and any traces left of the American Dream, turned into a Mad magazine comic sketch in a Tarantino movie.  The irony is that Manson had actually plotted to start a race war, killing rich Hollywood celebrities, drawing plenty of attention, making it look like the Black Panthers did it, leaving paw prints and the word “PIG”in blood on the wall, hoping to turn the world into utter chaos and annihilation, stoking the flames, hoping to leave an opening for their group to fill the power vacuum, a deluded dream if ever there was one, but it’s not that different than what finally graces the screen, gruesome, emptyheaded and outrageous, but selling popcorn and tickets. 

Jackie Brown

JACKIE BROWN                  A-                   

USA  (154 mi)  1997  d:  Quentin Tarantino              Official site

I was the third brother of five
Doing whatever I had to do to survive
I’m not saying what I did was alright
Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day to day fight

Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind
I knew there was a better way of life that I was just trying to find
You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester

A high voltage performance by the legendary Pam Grier, star of Blaxploitation flicks like COFFY (1973), FOXY BROWN (1974), and SHEBA, BABY (1975), even going so far as to use some of the same music from those earlier films, basically portraying a badass chick caught up in a man’s world, described as the “baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town!,” whose sophisticated screen presence sends this into another stratosphere, though it is accompanied by one of the weirdest of all Robert De Niro appearances of all time, underutilized to the point where he utters almost nothing throughout an entire film, a stark contrast from the tour de force role of Pam Grier as Jackie Brown, a woman in trouble, as the film explores all avenues of her particular plight.  Freely adapting Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch, the only adaptation on Tarantino’s resumé to date, while also a riff on THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973), which featured a flamboyant and cocky arms dealer named “Jackie Brown” (which slyly evolves into the Ordell character).  While adding plenty of his own dialogue, his follow-up to Pulp Fiction (1994) revived the careers of both Grier and Robert Forster, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor, with Tarantino lamenting the fact that Grier was not similarly nominated.  Despite the titular character, who was changed from being white in the book to black, written specifically with Grier in mind, the centerpiece of the film is a foul-mouthed Samuel L. Jackson character named Ordell, whose use of profanity is nothing short of poetic, waxing eloquently to his numbskull criminal accomplice Louis, (Robert De Niro), a former cellmate recently released from prison for bank robbery, a heavy who mostly just nods approval between hits from a bong waterpipe.  Ordell is the criminal mastermind behind everything that happens in this movie, viewed as a Fu Manchu style high priest of iniquity from Compton, a smooth-talking street hustler who lives the good life in a beach house overlooking the ocean, but never goes near the water, instead running guns for various drug lords, executing those that step out of line, relishing his position of unfettered power, seemingly untouchable, where no one but Jackson could so easily inhabit this diabolical character (supposedly Jackson’s favorite Tarantino role).  Two seemingly unrelated events set the gears in motion for this LA crime drama, with Ordell hunkered into his bachelor pad with a white princess, Bridget Fonda as Melanie, a beach bimbo who sits around getting high all day while watching TV, keeping Louis company whenever Ordell goes out on business.  An innocuous phone call from one of his partners in crime leads him to a professional bail bondsman Max Cherry, Robert Forster, a by-the-books decent kind of guy who knows the business inside and out, but is willing to do business with Odell as he pays upfront in cash, getting his friend out of jail on serious charges, though he winds up dead the next morning, where viewers witness the execution.  Simultaneously, Jackie Brown is a flight attendant stopped by ATF agents on a return flight from Cabo in Mexico, caught with $50,000 in cash along with a stash of cocaine that may have been planted by the cops, who are caught off guard when she refuses to cough up the name of the man she’s working for, instead having to spend a night in jail, while Ordell returns to Max for her get out of jail free card.   

The evening of Jackie’s release tells the film’s real story, as she appears like an apparition, a noirish femme fatale character escorted home by none other than Max himself, delivered in style, asking her out for a drink, but she declines, stealthily removing a gun from the glove compartment instead, which she uses when paid a visit by Ordell shortly after her arrival home, turning the tables on him, Jackie Brown (1997) Best Scene (3:17), reasserting a more equitable power dynamic as viewers realize she works for him, delivering money from his stash in Cabo, but now that the Feds are onto her she’s got to play ball in order to keep her job, so she has to give the appearance of cooperating while figuring out their own moves on the side.  Realizing his gun’s gone (using split screen), Max pays her a visit the next morning with Jackie in a bathrobe, claiming she needed to wash the jail out of her hair, instead fixing him coffee, playing him the luxuriant grooves of the Delfonics, Jackie Brown (5/12) Movie CLIP - The Delfonics (1997) HD YouTube (2:43), literally cementing a relationship that has only just begun.  Both performers were in their heyday in the 60’s and 70’s, with Forster appearing in Medium Cool (1969), and before that in John Huston’s REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967), while Grier received a brief revival as a recurring character in the short-lived television series Crime Story (1986 – 88), which was absolutely brilliant, by the way, the predecessor to The Soprano’s (1999 – 2007), featuring an eclectic mix of high octane action with 60’s period music, where Grier’s appearances were a highpoint of each episode.  Curiously, both actors bring the weight of their past into their roles, adding gravitas not only to the overall film, but especially in their scenes together, which remain understated throughout, where a connection is merely suggested, but when Max goes to a record store and buys a Delfonics tape, all bets are off, as we know he’s in it for the long haul.  But Ordell remains the central figure, going through his own meltdown mode, hilariously revealed with complete nonchalance in a perfectly set up bar sequence that looks right out of Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), though not as splashy, as Ordell gets his comeuppance, Jackie Brown - Ordell Meet's Jackie YouTube (2:00), realigning the rules of the game.  What’s different about this film is there is a smaller body count, with less emphasis on the acts of violence themselves and more on how to live in a world surrounded by the threat of violence, where each seems to make their own decisions that lead to their own moral pathway, as some die for nothing, others for simple rudeness, but a message is sent about a senseless waste of life that seems to define Ordell’s world, seemingly snared by his own game, living a cutthroat existence where no one is trustworthy and everyone is expendable.  Characters disappear, as they do in other Tarantino films, but here there is a certain sadness at their loss, as we’ve spent enough time getting to know some of these characters so that they end up mattering to us, even if they’re goofballs.  In this way the film resembles Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), with Grier assuming the Angie Dickenson character, a real dynamo, where the more time spent with the characters only makes the film more appealing, eventually turning into something we can’t take our eyes off of, as we’re invested in the outcome. 

       

What’s interesting is that the titular character doesn’t utter a sentence of dialogue until 30-minutes into the picture, with all the spotlight shining on Ordell, a king in his dysfunctional kingdom, yet using often obscure 1970’s soul hits peppered throughout the film, where it’s Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” from a 1972 film by the same name playing over the opening credit sequence that gets us into the psychological mindset of the film, Jackie Brown intro - YouTube (3:52), used again at the end, like bookends, though by then the full weight of their lives seems written into that song.  Despite Grier’s towering performance, arguably one of the best in the last 30 years, it was the utterly pedestrian Helen Hunt in AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997) who was the Academy Award choice as Best Actress.  This kind of head scratcher is par for the course with the Hollywood Academy, comprised of wealthy white individuals who could simply not put themselves in Grier’s position, a woman of color arrested by the Feds presumably to get at her boss, where she has to play the complex balancing act of appearing to cooperate in order to stay out of jail while not saying anything too revealing that might get her killed by her boss.  This is real acting, as in essence, due to the amazingly stressful circumstances she finds herself in, she has to become a consummate liar, yet be completely believable to whoever she happens to be fooling, where she has to have enough personality and guile to take all of your money, where by the end you’re literally handing it over to her, unaware that you’re being played.  Years beyond her glory days, she is the stuff of legends, once viewed as a stone cold fox, but now she’s added another dimension, maturity, as she’s a working girl for a two-bit airline, her position described by the Feds as “You’re forty-four years of age.  You’re flying for the shittiest little shuttle-fucking piece of shit Mexican airline that there is.  Where you make what?  $13,000 dollars a year?”  Yet the audience is taken by the allure of her beauty and power and vulnerability, where in every appearance she maintains every last shred of dignity, becoming something real onscreen, someone each one of us in the audience would believe, never guessing she was in a world of trouble, as she always looks like a million bucks.  That’s certainly how Max sees her for the first time, perhaps thinking it’s all a mirage, but he’s taken by her natural wit and candor, her will to survive, where she doesn’t have to try to be alluring and sexy, as she already is just by being herself, even in her worst moments.  They discuss how they feel about growing old, where she confesses, “You know I make $16,000 dollars a year plus retirement benefits that ain’t worth a damn.  And with this arrest hanging over my head, Max, I’m scared.  And if I lose this job, I gotta start all over again and I ain’t got nothing to start over with.  I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get.  And that shit is more scary than Ordell.”  These are the moments that try one’s soul, where she has to look herself in the mirror and figure it out.  That’s what kind of movie this is, getting to the absolute essentials, for real, in a brief period of time, surrounded by cartoonish male characters who think they have all the answers, who look right through her as if she’s not even there, underestimating the power of a women in need.  Like a noir valentine to the 70’s, this is a tribute to one of the great American actresses who ever lived, yet never received the recognition she deserved, who worked circles around everyone else, yet no one paid her any mind, because her life, like Gena Rowlands’ Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), was all under the radar, unnoticed and unfamiliar, like foreign territory, where it takes a performance like this to shake us out of our cobwebs and finally see a woman in all her glory.  

Pam Grier on influencing feminism as the original bad-ass female ... From a Tina Hassannia interview with Grier from The Globe and Mail, October 1, 2015:

If you enjoyed Charlize Theron’s brutal turn in Mad Max: Fury Road this past summer, you can thank Pam Grier, the original bad-ass female action hero. While working as a receptionist for American International Pictures, Grier was discovered by Roger Corman in the 1970s and cast in his women-in-prison and “Blaxploitation” films. But Grier is more than just an icon of that grindhouse era, and her feminist influences on filmmakers and actresses feels equally resonant today, not to mention recognizable in nearly every movie scheduled for the TIFF Bell Lightbox's new series Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes. Grier is an inspiring feminist both onscreen and in real life. In her memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, she recounts tales of sexism and racism, and two sexual assaults in her younger days, all of which made her more determined to succeed at a time when women of colour had few opportunities to make it in showbiz.

The Globe and Mail spoke with Grier before she makes her way to Toronto to introduce a handful of her films at the retrospective.

What is it like being the original bad-ass female action hero?

Oh, you’re trying to blame me? [Laughs] But there was Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis and Betty Hutton! I grew up on that. I got picked on a lot, so I would escape by watching Rin Tin Tin and Lassie and Roy Rogers. I wasn’t wussy, but I was thin and bird-like, and I wanted to learn how to fight back because sometimes I was just thrown down the stairs for entertainment. And I wanted it to stop. It was traumatic. I grew from it and it helped me become less fearful and to be able to have confidence and show women that it’s okay to be a leader. My grandfather wanted the girls [in the family] to do everything the boys did – to hunt, fish, shoot, drive, bring the boat in. He wanted us to be self-sufficient. That formed my inner strength. I wanted to bring all of that to film. With humour.

You brought your self-sufficiency to your work, including early on when you were doing your own stunts. What was that like?

The Epper family were a superb group of stunt people and they taught me so much. But I didn’t have an African-American or woman-of-colour stunt double. So I did a few of my own.

And that ability helped you get the title role in Coffy.

Roger Corman was the real front-runner on making these films with women, and they hadn’t thought of a woman of colour until they found out that I could do martial arts. I watched martial-arts films with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because he was a good friend of Bruce Lee’s, and I’d studied martial arts growing up on military air bases.

What were the producers’ reactions like when you said you could do your own stunts?

I don’t know if they thought I could do it until we got on location, and then they saw me go berserk! What made it more difficult was that they didn’t make sports bras back then.

You’ve worked with so many directors and actors …

Not enough, girl. Let me tell you the truth. I haven’t worked with Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. But between Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino, I tell everyone: I've been to the mountaintop. When someone devotes two years of their life to write a script for you [Jackie Brown], you know, not everyone gets a script written for them. After all that, I’m good. I’m okay.

Of those you have worked with, who has inspired you or transformed your approach to acting?

There’s Ray Bradbury with Something Wicked This Way Comes. Florence Henderson [in Ladies of the House] – she and I came from parallel worlds. I learned a lot from Jennifer Beals and Ossie Davis in The L Word. And there was Michael Keaton in Jackie Brown, watching him and Samuel [L. Jackson]. I learned from them that as an actor, your body is an instrument, and you can move kinetically and speak faster, slower or rhythmically.

Your work ethic seems inspired by the feminist influences in your life.

On Twitter I found an African-American woman who was one of the first forest rangers. She’s 94 and an amazing human being. That could have been me. I came from a certain mindset of women in an era where, thanks to things like the Vietnam War, so many men didn’t come home, or came home wounded and couldn’t take care of the home. So if you were female and had a degree or trade, you got out there and used it.

You uprooted yourself while holding down three jobs to go to the Philippines and shoot these movies with Corman. And you were reading Stanislavski while on set, because you wanted to be prepared.

I was saving every dime and I was so crazy and heartbroken thanks to a third attack on my life, which nearly killed me. It’s not in [the memoir]; the editors took it out. But that’s when I changed, because I fought back. This was the ultimate decision that changed me into who I became. I’m now working on a film script about my life, and we put that third attack back in. Because that was the moment where I said, ‘You know what, I don’t give a shit about marriage, I’m so tired of men raping women and getting away with it.’ For several seconds during the attack, I went fucking crazy, all hell broke loose. I was so mad at the world. So I went back to Roger and asked, ‘Is that job still available?’ I needed to get away. He told me to read Stanislavski, and I did and grew at such magnitude. I’m so respectful of the actor. I was approaching these B-movies like it was Chekhov or Tennessee Williams. For me, it was just like theatre, and there is no take two. You’ve got to be perfect. I had to go to the other side of the world to find out who I was. I didn’t think I would survive it, but here I am talking to you.

You made an entire career out of it.

It's been 45 years. [Laughs] And I have at least three gold watches. And an Apple watch, too.