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''I'M AS SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK''

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How to account for Tarantino's cult cachet? An entire newsgroup on the Internet is devoted to debates over who shot Mr. Pink in Dogs and whether Tarantino is ripping off or paying homage to earlier films in his own. Director Allison Anders (Mi Vida Loca), who got to know him after the two debuted at the '92 Sundance Film Festival, says his works "make you feel in on an experience that's exclusive, even if it's not, even if it's the top- grossing movie of the weekend." The rest of the answer may be that he does the same thing for his actors, and it shows. For the first time in years, Willis didn't ask to see rough cuts; he trusted Tarantino. "It's the most creative process I've ever been involved in," says the actor. "We worked on a level of focus and detail I've never experienced before." Travolta chokes up when he considers what Tarantino has done for him. "There (are) very few people that tune into you as an artist the way Quentin tuned into me," he says. "Quentin gave me my job back as an actor." "I'm as totally serious about what I'm doing, you know, as a heart attack," the director states, "but I don't take myself seriously. I take the work seriously."

The only painting among the many movie posters in Tarantino's apartment hangs above the action figures on the living-room mantel. It's of his once and current love, Grace Lovelace, an English professor at the University of California at Irvine. (The name Grace adorns a motorcycle in Pulp.) Tarantino's friends-who say he's been looking forward to being famous for a long time-are reassured by his resurrected romance. Jerry Martinez, an employee at the Manhattan Beach video store where Tarantino worked for five years, says that his script for '93's True Romance "tells you a lot about Quentin's fantasies. He's truly a romantic. He's a sweet, decent guy." "He's a ham," says Connie Zastoupil, Tarantino's mother, "(but) he has a very level head." According to Zastoupil, 47, a health-care executive, Tarantino's biography has already evolved into something larger than life. "Most of what I read is not true," she says. "In the beginning I thought Quentin was trying to glamorize things. I said to him, 'Where are they getting these L'il Abner stories?'" Yes, Tarantino's mother was born in Tennessee, and so was Quentin, but they're no products of Dogpatch. Zastoupil attended high school in L.A. and wed college student Tony Tarantino at 16; within three months she left her husband and took off for the University of Tennessee, where she learned she was pregnant. At 19 she earned a degree in microbiology and returned to California. Tarantino was adopted by his mother's new husband, a musician, Curt Zastoupil. The couple divorced when Quentin was 9. Tarantino has "never shown any real interest" in meeting his father, says his mother. "I know his name," Tarantino says flatly. Young Quentin liked horror movies but was too scared to sit through Bambi, and though his IQ tested at 160, he avoided school. His mother knew that if he wasn't in class, he was home writing. "He wrote me sad Mother's Day stories," she recalls. "He'd always kill me and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother's eye." The year of restful vegetation Tarantino was planning has quite a crowded agenda now. Tarantino, who's played small roles in his own films and steals the show with his cameo in this fall's Sleep With Me (he explicates the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun), was three weeks into acting out his Destiny- the title role in the independent comedy Destiny Turns On the Radio-when Pulp Fiction opened last month. Next year he'll have his second big role, in the French film Hands Up!, to be shot in L.A. with actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Cement Garden). In December, he'll direct one of four episodes of Miramax's anthology film Four Rooms, with fellow Sundance alumni Anders, Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), and Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup). "It's one day in the life of a hotel like the Chateau Marmont on New Year's Eve," says Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein, who helped sign a top-flight cast for scale, headed by Willis and Madonna. Tim Roth stars as the bellboy in the interlocking stories, which the four writer-directors wrote separately, then hitched together into what they hope will be a seamless whole. Tarantino costars with Willis in his episode. Doesn't writing and directing himself in Four Rooms qualify as work? "Compared to Pulp," he says, "it's just push-ups." And then, some time in '95, he hopes to pierce that fog and "find it." He's already passed on Speed Racer but wouldn't mind directing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. "That's something I would do a real good job with, a big summer movie, let's go for it," he says and pauses. "Now, I still think I would spend less than other people." Other options: He and his producer, Lawrence Bender, may make two $5 million movies back-to-back with the same crew as part of his Miramax first-look deal. And Weinstein says he has acquired four Elmore Leonard novels, including Freaky Deaky, at Tarantino's suggestion; Weinstein hopes he'll direct one of them. But for now he's acting. And trying to keep perspective. At the Oct. 12 press conference at which David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg announced their intention to form a new studio, Spielberg, when asked what movies they want to make, said, "We'd love to have a Pulp Fiction from talent like Tarantino." Meanwhile, Tarantino, the man whose name is on everyone's lips, was busy acting in Destiny. Talking about his role as the god of gamblers, he boasted to pal Anders, "I'm number two on the call sheet!" "That's nice, dear," she replied.