LOS ANGELES–Here's some bad news. It's quite possible that cleaning up after yourself could prevent you from being a great filmmaker. Quentin Tarantino's inability to keep his house clean led directly to a collaboration with Robert Rodriguez on one of the most anticipated films of the year. In a Los Angeles hotel room, Tarantino says that on the day Rodriguez came over to his house to show him clips from his film Sin City, for which Tarantino is credited as "guest director", things were a mess.

"I am a movie guy who is single, so my house looks like it belongs to a single movie guy. There are stacks of video cassettes and 16mm-film canisters and posters and stuff all over the place. So as Robert was trying to negotiate this cinematic land mine, he stepped over this old double-feature poster from AIP's [American International Pictures'] juvenile-delinquent days. The poster was from Rock All Night and Dragster Days. He said, 'I have a poster like this at home too.' And he told me that he thought it would be cool to do a double feature. I said, 'I have so many stories that I will never finish. Maybe [it would work] if you take one and I take another”¦'"

The double feature they decided to make includes two full-length films. Rodriguez contributed Planet Terror, the story of a virus that turns humans into zombies, while Tarantino made Death Proof, a movie about a stunt driver (Kurt Russell) who terrorizes a small town. The two films, which are packaged under the title Grindhouse, open Friday (April 6).

Tarantino, whose film school was the archives of the video stores he worked in, has never denied that he likes to take things from the directors and films he admires. ("Real artists steal; hacks do homages," he says.) Both movies are somewhat similar to films of the era they are saluting, though unlike most low-budget films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which appeared to exploit women, the heroes of these new features are female. However, Tarantino argues that women were empowered in many of his favourite films of the era, especially 1973's Coffy, directed by exploitation veteran Jack Hill.

"Coffy is empowering from beginning to end. Coffy [played by Tarantino favourite Pam Grier, the star of his film Jackie Brown] takes on the male characters. My favourite subtextual film-criticism book ever written is Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Her take on the slasher genre is that it is one of the few genres where the woman gets to defeat the villain and that it is her femininity and moral fortitude that allows her to take on pure evil. In the case of Coffy, there is some pornography in that Pam Grier had to take her top off, but I think the empowering aspect of those films was legitimate."

Tarantino has empowered female characters in the past, with Uma Thurman's vengeful Kill Bill character perhaps the best example. In Death Proof, Zoe Bell, who was Thurman's stunt double, has a key role as a stuntwoman named Zoe out to avenge an attack by a male stuntman (Russell). Bell says she was surprised at how well Tarantino writes for women. "We [Bell and her costars] remarked on several occasions that when you read the script you think, 'That is something I would say.'"

Tarantino says he doesn't know why the actors or audience members would be surprised that he writes well for women. "I am a writer, so it is my job to write characters. I think that people who can only write about themselves cannot be very good writers. I understand different people's humanity, and I feel that if someone says something interesting or uses a turn of phrase or if they show some idiosyncratic character aspect, it is my job as a writer to hold on to it. It may be 10 or 15 years before it comes out, but it is always there. I have a lot of female friends, and I listen to the way they talk and I soak it in like a sponge.”¦I think that 75 percent of being a good writer is having a good memory."

Tarantino says that one of the things he took with him from working in video stores could eventually lead to him making movies for children. "I have wanted to come up with a story for a kids' movie because I learned working in video archives that if a kid liked a movie like The Mighty Ducks, they would see it 20 times. I just think that that is an audience member I want on my side, and if I find the right story line, I will go after it."