GROWING UP; TARANTINO'S `JACKIE BROWN' MAY BE THE DIRECTOR'S COMING-OF-AGE FILM.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

After spending most of the '90s as Hollywood's Great Young Hope, Quentin Tarantino says he's finally grown up.

No longer the film geek one step removed from video store clerkdom, he's moved out of his memorabilia-packed apartment to a roomier, memorabilia-filled house in the hills. The writer-director-actor, who won an Oscar for ``Pulp Fiction's'' screenplay, has settled into a mature relationship with Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino.

And Tarantino's new film, ``Jackie Brown,'' is a character-based caper comedy that does without the shocking violence and self-conscious superhipness that marked his earlier feature films, ``Pulp'' and ``Reservoir Dogs,'' and his screenplays for ``True Romance,'' ``Natural Born Killers'' and ``From Dusk Till Dawn.''

``I did change, but I think it's all for the good,'' Tarantino, 34, says of his reaction to the success of ``Pulp,'' the $6 million, independent production that grossed more than $100 million and influenced a generation of young filmmakers. ``I changed the way an adult changes, the way a man changes, the way you change when you become successful in your profession. I was happy with it; it was a very adult-making experience, and God bless you for it.''

It's unclear who Tarantino wants to be blessed. His legion of avid fans, who've been wondering why it took him three years to get around to directing another feature? Journalists who, while generally supportive, are now asking annoying questions like why there's so much racially charged language in his dialogue and what's he going to do about the situation with Don Murphy, the ``NBK'' producer who's suing Tarantino over a punching incident in an L.A. restaurant?

While he won't speak about the latter matter and addresses the language controversy with annoyance, Tarantino has good reasons for the delay between ``Pulp'' and ``Jackie.''

``I was never scared of following up `Pulp Fiction,' and I was kind of insulted by the pontificating in that regard,'' he explains. ``Let's face it; I made all the money I could ever need from that movie. I'd worked my whole life, and finally I had a situation where I could just stop and really invest in life and enjoy it. I did it, and I loved it.

``The other point is, I'm a writer; that's what I do. That means when I decided to start, I had to start from the very beginning. And Elmore Leonard is not an easy guy to adapt. It took me a full year to do that adaptation, with some of the most insightful breakthroughs happening in the last two months of that year.''

Tarantino has made some noteworthy changes to Leonard's crime novel ``Rum Punch.'' Most obviously, he's changed the leading lady from a white to an African-American woman. This, he says, puts Jackie Brown's plight in stronger relief - she's a middle-aged, underpaid flight attendant for a fly-by-night airline, who's got to help the feds bust a murderous gunrunner or face a prison term.

Mainly, though, it gave him a chance to work with Pam Grier. A Tarantino obsession since he fell in love with her '70s exploitation movies ``Coffy,'' ``Foxy Brown'' and ``Sheba Baby,'' Grier had all the qualities he was looking for in Jackie Brown. His hope is to jumpstart her career with this movie the same way ``Pulp'' did John Travolta's.

``Just about everybody my age had a crush on Pam,'' he explains. ``She was the bomb when she came out. `Coffy's' one of my favorite movies. But let's be honest; most people who were adapting `Rum Punch,' first off, would have made her younger, 31 or 32. For me, that completely invalidates the urgency of the story. She's almost, like, worked her way down the ladder - she is the working poor. And now she's gonna be thrown in jail, and now she's gonna lose that.

``And Pam's lived a life. When you point the camera at Pam Grier's face, you send the film to the lab and you've got something coming back. Hers hasn't been a cush life. She's had highs, she's had lows, she's had so much experience and so much life in her, and that's exactly what Jackie Brown needed.''

Grier is part of an eclectic cast that includes big stars Robert De Niro and Michael Keaton in supporting roles; another nearly forgotten actor, Robert Forster (``Alligator,'' TV's ``Banyon''); Bridget Fonda as a pot-smoking beach bunny; and ``Pulp'' star Samuel L. Jackson as the wacky but dangerous arms dealer, Ordell.

According to Grier, Tarantino turned the South Bay locations of ``Jackie Brown'' into the working equivalent of a movable party.

A celebration of life

``When you work with Quentin, it's like a celebration of life,'' Grier enthuses. ``Because he's inclusive. Every race, creed, color, religion, age, weight, size; he loves people. And he loves music. On our breaks, we were dancing. He'd play salsa, polka, r&b, rap, hip hop, and we would dance with each other on the set.''

``Jackie Brown'' boasts a typically eclectic, hand-picked soundtrack, heavy on '70s soul hits such as ``Across 110th Street'' and ``Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time).'' But it's equally loaded, in Ordell's case anyway, with the racial slur Jackson also employed extensively in ``Pulp Fiction.''

Tarantino acknowledges that he understands people's concerns about perpetuating pejoratives, not only in films but in other elements of pop culture like rap music.

Still, ``As an artist, it doesn't really fit in my world,'' he says. ``People's attitudes about that mean no more to me than Hillary Clinton saying people shouldn't smoke in movies. If my characters are gonna smoke they're gonna smoke, all right? If I'm depicting a person and that's the way that person talks, that's the way they talk. An image committee isn't going to change the way that person talks. If I was an actor playing that role, no presidential this or PTA that would change the truth of what I'm trying to get at.''

Which makes you wonder what Tarantino's Broadway acting debut, in a revival of the potentially politically incorrect ``Wait Until Dark,'' will be like. Whether or not it causes controversy, Tarantino is looking forward to the thriller about a sadistic killer who stalks a blind woman, which he starts rehearsing with Marisa Tomei in January.

``I'm into that; I'm so excited, I just can't wait,'' he gushes. ``Especially after spending the time doing this movie and not acting in it, working with De Niro and Sam Jackson and Robert Forster, all of these wonderful actors ... Boy, you'd better believe the juices were flowing. I wanted to get in there and do it with them, but there really wasn't a part for me.

``Knowing that I had this play waiting at the end of all this was just this wonderful carrot I had in front of my nose.''

Ear-to-ear enthusiasm

If you detect a certain boyish enthusiasm in that statement, you should have seen Quentin's ear-to-ear grin when he said it. There's still a part of him that hasn't outgrown the hyper-talkative, South Bay film freak, and hopefully never will.

Yet one thing he's determined to do is keep growing artistically.

``I try to challenge myself and do something new, and I think I've done that with this movie, so far as tone is concerned,'' he says. ``People have been saying to me that this is the most mature film I've ever made. I agree with that, though I don't know if mature is necessarily better or worse.

``I also feel that in the course of this movie, I've gone about as far as I can go with the shooting style that I've come to learn how to do. I've always thought that it must be really wonderful for, like, Spielberg or De Palma or Scorsese to have their talent at their fingertips. What I mean by that is they're not sweating how to pull off one of their set pieces. They know how to execute it, and that's something that happens in the course of directing a few films.

``I've always worked completely organically, but now I want to mix it up,'' Tarantino concludes. ``I want to vary it up, if just for the fact that I don't want anything to get stale.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) Director Quentin Terantino, left, with actor Robert De Niro on the set of ``Jackie Brown.''

(2) Tarantino, left, admits to an obsession with actress Pam Grier, whom he picked to play ``Jackie Brown's'' title role.

(3 -- color) Quotable Quentin