"I READ, IN A BOOK about Bette Davis, that anybody who does an interview while drinking alcohol is a damned fool. When I saw that, I thought, 'Oh my god, she's right! What have I been doing my whole career?' '' Quentin Tarantino offers me a glass of red wine from a recently opened bottle that's about half-full when I arrive at his house way up in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking the green-ridged canyons on a hot August evening. ''I hope you're a damned fool, too!''

Seated at a table by the pool behind the large and rambling home he bought in 1996 when he was making ''Jackie Brown,'' Tarantino is in baggy jeans and a brown hoodie, and because he is the ultimate auteur movie geek — I've never met anyone with such an encyclopedic knowledge of film — we are soon talking about our mutual affection for the critic Pauline Kael.