Quentin Tarantino is one of the most arrogant film directors alive and once upon a time he was equal to the boast. But the brat pack ego that buoyed him through the 1990s is wearing thin. The Pope of Pulp – or the Earl of Hurl as Empire magazine recently dubbed him – is not the force he used to be. Unlike his indie contemporary Steven Soderbergh he has refused to grow up. Crucially, his films have failed to grow up either.

I get a brief chance to ask the man himself about the need for a change of direction when he turns up at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, South London, for a special screening of his latest film, Death Proof. It is a full house and the closing-night gala of the TCM Crime Scene festival (in association with The Times). There’s a small scrum in the foyer as Tarantino arrives. He is dressed in a check shirt and black trousers with a silvery-white racing stripe running up the seam. The bony forehead and schoolboy laugh are instantly recognisable. So too is the rapid-speaking confidence with which he defends his record.

Can we look forward to a new direction, or perhaps a Tarantino take on European cinema? “I don’t need new jumping-off points to tell a story,” he snaps. He is horrified by the idea of tackling a European maestro such as Ingmar Bergman. “I’m not Bergman. Why would I want to make a Bergman movie? I’m Quentin. I make Quentin movies. I don’t need new genres, or sub-genres, to tell a story.”

Later, in a general question-and-answer session, he admits that he thought he hated the classic European masterpieces of the Fifties and Sixties until Martin Scorsese revealed how he gradually introduced them to his own daughter after Fellini died. He also admits that his knowledge of Ozu, Bergman and Antonioni is not what it could be.

That’s by the bye. Five films in the 15 years since Reservoir Dogs is not the strike rate of a driven auteur – although, to be fair, he has racked up 17 film-writing credits as well. There’s a creeping suspicion that the great man is on the slide as a director. You don’t have to look far to find evidence. His Grindhouseexperiment with Robert Rodriguez was nothing short of disastrous. The two directors made back-to-back splatter movies – Planet Terror and Death Proof – and presented them complete with missing reels, inexplicable jump cuts, cheesy intermission plugs and terrible sound quality. It confused American audiences, many of whom left in the interval before the second half of the bill.

The Weinstein Company and the directors rapidly agreed to snap the double bill in two and launch them as separate films. Death Proof made it on to the main menu of the Cannes Film Festival but it wasn’t the unqualified success Harvey Weinstein or indeed the critics were expecting.

The film is an eloquent lament for a sleazy age of exploitation flicks that most of us can barely remember. Kurt Russell plays a scar-faced psycho called Stunt Man Mike. He stalks impossibly beautifully chicks with little brains and fewer clothes. Then he tries to kill them by chasing them up and down empty highways in a souped-up monster car with a reinforced cage built around his driving seat, hence Death Proof.

The violence, when it eventually comes, is a seminal piece of schlock. But the script – usually Tarantino’s forte – is wildly and worryingly overwritten. The appalling dialogue, mostly about the sexual predilections of his mostly female characters, is so badly garbled and tedious that it fails to make much impact. A telling detail is that the DVD is about to be released in the United States while the film has barely opened here. Why, you wonder, does Tarantino keep digging up a genre and its many tangential subs when, like most things in life, it has moved irretrievably on – ironically as a result of his own previous work?

Tarantino’s ability to turn character and dialogue-driven drama into blockbusters such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction is what established him as a cult figure. That magic is fading, and with it his influence. The director is losing his ability to take his audiences with him on adventures that start in one place and end up in some other bizarre movie clime. Irony is fine (his films bathe in it) but what about storytelling?

Crucially, he is arguably out of sync with the market and the serious money. His violent adult films will always have devotees but he’s cutting the mustard with a shrinking older audience, and not growing a new and younger following.

The generation of taboo exploitation films from which he takes his cues is almost out of sight and out of mind. They were always more memorable for their posters and the tabloid hysteria of the times than for anything they had to say.

Tarantino will always be credited for brilliantly reinventing this raft of debased movie genres with films that exceed the quality of the originals by square miles. He’s got sublime taste in music. He has dramatically resurrected the ailing careers of actors such as John Travolta, Bruce Willis, David Carradine and, in Death Proof, Kurt Russell, and given them lucrative new leases of life. Frankly, Russell (complete with eyepatch) hasn’t been this gripping since Escape from New York.

But can the director sustain his own career by nostalgia alone? He is obviously annoyed by the idea that his films are often perceived to be a medley of homages. Yet in Death Proof it is almost impossible to miss the conveyor belt of nods to movies such as Vanishing Point, Duel, or David Cronenberg’s Crash. “Who am I homaging?” he argues in our conversation. “This [ Death Proof] is the first script I’ve written since Reservoir Dogs where I came up with a brand-new story idea and just sat down and wrote it. In the last couple of films the genres came first and then I found a story to tell inside them. I pretty much need to start with a blank page now.”

He is, by his own admission, “quite precious” about this gift that apparently comes very easily to him. That said, there is some doubt about just how easy these blank pages are to fill. Tarantino is still talking about making a spaghetti western-style cowboy film, and a Second World War film, Inglorious Bastards, four years after he announced that these might be his next movies. “Just because I want to do something like that, until I have a [good] story, I’m not,” says Tarantino, which seems fair enough if you’re Tarantino, and slightly alarming if you’re his agent.

I ask him if there’s a lifespan to making movies. “I don’t want to be making movies after I’m 64,” he laughs (he’s 44 now). Would it frighten him if and when people started remaking his classics? The director howls. “It’s not that ridiculous,” he says. “They already are and I love it. I loved it when Hong Kong ripped off Reservoir Dogs. Then Japan did. Then India did. The Indian version [ Kaante] is terrific. It’s like four hours long with a great cast full of these big famous Indian stars. They actually start telling the story and then go back in time for an hour to set up all the characters.”

It seems churlish to pick holes in a director on the evidence of one weakish movie. But then again his films are not exactly queueing up like London buses. Tarantino’s standards are so high that any slump in quality or box office is going to hurt him. There’s no question that he is still a man to be reckoned with, a genius in fact. But he can ill afford to overestimate his pulling power.

Lend me your ears: those classic Tarantino moments

The ear amputation in Reservoir Dogs
To the sound of Stealers Wheel’s Stuck In the Middle With You Mr Blond (Michael Madsen) tortures a cop, then slices his ear off.

The adrenaline injection in Pulp Fiction
The boss’s wife (Uma Thurman) overdoses on heroin. Vincent Vega (John Travolta) rushes her to his dealer for a life-saving injection of adrenalin straight to the heart.

Pam Grier on an airport travelator in Jackie Brown
Grier’s stewardess makes her first appearance carrying a stash of cash and drugs and with Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street playing in the background.

The fight in the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Volume 1
Thurman dismantles 88 assorted yakuza with a samurai sword in a scene that took eight weeks to shoot.

Death Proof is released on Sept 21. The Q&A with Quentin Tarantino will be shown on the film channel TCM (Turner Classic Movies) on Saturday (8.30pm) as part of its Crime Scene season.

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