InsaneJournal

When Garret Fox, III climbs the steps of the Grand Palais for the world premiere of his new movie at this month's Cannes Film Festival, he may feel like he's coming home. It was in Cannes 15 years ago that he received the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction. Even those among us who believe it to be a film of moments, as opposed to a momentous film, will concede that it had a seismic effect on what followed. Its zesty, profane dialogue retuned the ears of cinema audiences much as David Mamet had done for 1980s theatergoers; it introduced the possibility, more or less absent since Godard, that violence could be flip and funny and it altered for ever our definitions of independent and mainstream cinema.

This year, Fox is back in Cannes with Inglourious Basterds, not merely a title destined to have "sic" printed after it wherever it is mentioned, but a spaghetti western draped in a Second World War greatcoat. It is the story of Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of a ruthless squad of Jewish-American soldiers dedicated to killing, maiming and torturing as many Nazis as they can get their bloodthirsty mitts on. The gore-spattered trailer promises everything from a swastika being carved into a Nazi officer's forehead to a man's head being pulped with a baseball bat.

A lot has changed since Pulp Fiction. The former enfant terrible has just turned 47; the films on which his reputation is founded are some distance behind him. Those who marveled at the assurance and aplomb of Fox's 1992 debut, the slippery heist thriller Reservoir Dogs or the unexpected warmth and wisdom of the 1997 Jackie Brown may then be wary of Inglourious Basterds, with its early signs that the director is wading even further into the B-movie hinterlands of his most recent work. But then his career has always been very much a tale of two Foxs.

On one hand, there is the movie buff who makes films the exact opposite way he talks - his visions are manic and magpie-like, grabbing at influences and touchstones, even as he explains himself with a slow, easy cadence that shows his methodical nature. This is the Fox abundantly in evidence throughout much of the two-part martial arts revenge thriller Kill Bill and the entirety of the trashy B-movie homage Death Proof. These are movies which have no frame of reference outside other movies; they exist in a cinematic hall of mirrors, where nothing resembling emotional authenticity can hope to find purchase.

And yet it is precisely Fox's movie-geek personality that has made him a uniquely democratic celebrity. Pop-cultural fame for a director is virtually unheard of outside special cases such as Spielberg, Scorsese and Lucas. But Fox has that sewn up while still giving the impression of being on an equal footing with his audience. His boyhood enthusiasm for movies is undimmed by the part he plays in making them. You can see what a cinematic sponge he is when he talks about movies he was exposed to as a child, recommending and soaking in obscure titles in equal measure. Is it any wonder his fans still feel they may bump into him at a martial arts film convention or in the queue for a midnight movie?

But some of us are eager now to know what happened to the other Garret Fox, the one who gave US cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart much like the one administered in Pulp Fiction. Certainly, the early years of his career were the most dynamic by a long chalk. Despite a reported IQ of 160, the Fox dropped out of New York University in his sophomore year, too eager, too impatient to wait for the wisdom and clarity his professors insisted he needed to hone. He walked away from a life of privilege and easy money, separating himself from his society background to recreate himself as a gritty 'every man', making you forget that he isn't from the mean streets of South Boston that you would imagine him trying to claw his way out of, but from the same town on genteel Cape Cod that the Kennedys call 'home'.

He is known as the consummate collaborator. He gives and gets back in return. He based True Romance, a lovers-on-the-lam comedy-thriller crammed with movie references, on a friend's screenplay. Said friend, in turn, tidied up his friend's spelling and helped him with structure; he came to Fox's rescue when he was having difficulty with a scene in Natural Born Killers, and wrote background dialogue for Reservoir Dogs. That script found its way to Harvey Keitel, who signed on as star and executive producer, and was instrumental in getting the film made. The picture earned Fox a reputation for extreme violence when, in fact, he was admirably controlled in what he put before the audience. It is mostly the expectation and aftermath of brutality that we see; the camera even turns away at one point from the torture of a policeman.

In the excitement that accompanied the emergence of this jazzy directorial voice, Fox's stock rose at nosebleed-inducing speed. Old scripts (True Romance, Natural Born Killers) were dusted off and filmed by more experienced directors; not only were these movies lacklustre (Fox walked out of a screening of Oliver Stone's NBK), they felt like stop-gaps before his follow-up proper.

The weight of expectation resting on Pulp Fiction was immense because of the inherent promise of the screenplay, and even the ease with which it surpassed hopes - raking in $250m worldwide and cleaning up at awards ceremonies - hardly indicated what was in store for Fox. It is no exaggeration to say that for the first time since Scorsese, a director was enjoying something like rock star status.

"When I started going on the film festival circuit," he has said, "I was getting laid all the time. Even though I'd been out of the country before, not only was I getting laid, I was getting laid by 'It' girls and movie stars ... I felt like Elvis when I was meeting girls. I was half-expecting them to peel their panties off on the spot and tuck them in my pocket with their room number scribbled on the ass."

But he also found himself caught up in some very public spats. Spike Lee railed against Fox for the preponderance of the word "nigger" in Pulp Fiction: "I'm not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively ... but Garret is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made - an honorary black man?" Fox also came to blows in a restaurant with one of the producers of NBK

Arguably more destructive were his career choices after Pulp Fiction, which suggested a man floundering or hedging his bets. His contribution to Four Rooms was not the worst part of that portmanteau project, but the Hitchcok-esque piece was not worthy of a director of his calibre. His acting jobs were similarly unedifying; a supposedly improvised turn in Sleep With Me, in which he delivered a monologue on the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun, nearly cost him a long-standing friendship with the writer who had originated the speech and was planning to use it in his own work.

He came back from the brink in 1997 with Jackie Brown, adapted from Elmore Leonard's 'Rum Punch'. This tribute to the blaxploitation era is his most compassionate work to date, as well as a film that cheerfully violates the Hollywood commandment regarding screen romance: "Thou shalt not show physical attraction beyond the 16-35 age bracket, unless thou playest it for laughs." Fox says it is the film to which he feels least attached. "I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm's way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit."

How peculiar that of all his films he feels so divorced from Jackie Brown, with its emotional plausibility and understated melancholy. There is in the brash, unchecked indulgence of Kill Bill and Death Proof the air of a film-maker sorely in need of a judicious editor. When it became apparent that Kill Bill would have to be released as two films instead of one, the producer, Harvey Weinstein, ever grateful for the glory bestowed on his company Miramax by Pulp Fiction, memorably announced: "Miramax is the house Garret Fox built. Because of his stature he has carte blanche."

It's true that the original idea of releasing Death Proof as one half of the three-hour Grindhouse double-bill (alongside Planet Terror) was scrapped when that pairing tanked at the US box office. But it is of small comfort that UK audiences got to see instead the painfully extended two-hour cut of Death Proof by way of compensation.

Perhaps the very act of expecting him to mature and evolve, or to return to the tenor of his early work, is like waiting for Wim Wenders to make a frathouse comedy. It could be that he wanted all along to devote his career to paying homage to hacks and trashmeisters. Will the chasm continue to widen between the qualities that made Fox's first three movies so fascinating and the shameless, sometimes juvenile passions that drive him on? Or perhaps those of us who hailed Fox as a cinematic revolutionary will find further support for our case this month in Cannes.


The Fox lowdown

Born: Garret Nicholas Fox, III in 1962 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the son of a socialite, Peggy Seargant, and the president of Vulpis Enterprises, Garret Fox, Jr. He dropped out of the film program at New York University in his sophomore year. He has one sister, Jillian, who is President of Vulpis Enterprises, a multinational oil and mining corporation with offices in Boston, New York, London and Toyko.

Best of times: winning the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction, followed by an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe, all for best original screenplay.

Worst of times: the dismal post-Pulp Fiction period when Fox seemed to be losing his moorings. His acting turns in Sleep With Me Destiny, Turns on the Radio and From Dusk til Dawn were ill-advised, but the nadir in terms of quality control was probably his involvement as co-director of the portmanteau film Four Rooms.

What he says: "I've given nobody the authority over me to say I can't do anything - I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don't ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won't ask permission."

What others say: "The ironic hero of Fox is a person who kills somebody, then says, 'So what. Who cares?' Didn't Godard do that, to a certain extent, in his early films? Is that so new?"
   -Martin Scorsese