THE SOUNDS OF SNOW AND SILENCE

By Rex Fontaine - The Independant - Sunday Jan 11, 1998. pp 24

TO THE National Film Theatre for a special screening of Quentin Tarantino's new film, Jackie Brown, and the Guardian-sponsored interview that follows. Radical chic is in the air. Noel Gallagher and Maxim Reality, member of rock controversialistsProdigy, give each other big hugs; Sharleen Spiteri, lead singer of Texas, is there; so too film director Terry Gilliam.

A bigger surprise, perhaps, is that Jackie Brown departs from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in its restrained depiction of violence. And Tarantino's image softens further when he reveals in his conversation with the NFT's Adrian Wootton that one of the few occasions on which he has been star- struck was when he went backstage at a London theatre a few years ago and was introduced to Peter O'Toole.

At the reception that followed I asked Tarantino to elaborate. What was the play? He looked a little sheepish. No, really he did. "I can't actually remember," he said. "But I do remember that Tara Fitzgerald was in it." That narrowed the field down to one: Our Song, a love story based on a book by Keith Waterhouse.

What about O'Toole? Did the meeting make as big an impression on him? He needed little prompting from me to remember it, loyally claiming Tarantino as an artistic brother-in-arms. "Pulp Fiction is the present-day Titus Andronicus," the acting legend pronounces.