SOURCE: "Quentin Tarantino," in Rolling Stone, November 3, 1994, pp. 76-78, 80-1, 110.

In the following essay, Wild discusses Tarantino's films, career, and artistic influences.

Quentin Tarantino, madman of movie mayhem, has a mother. How's that for a shocker? She has seen Reservoir Dogs, the 1992 heist film that made a cult sensation of her writer-director-actor son and raised the stakes on movie gore with a 10-minute torture scene featuring the severing of an ear. "That happens to be my mother's favorite scene," says Tarantino, 31, a high-school dropout who has gone from video-store clerk to genius auteur du jour in just a few feverishly busy years. Mom has just checked out Pulp Fiction, a wildly ambitious and darkly comic crime anthology about Los Angeles lowlife that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, opened the prestigious New York Film Festival and put her son in the hot-contender line at next year's Oscars. Although...