During a moment when directors often struggle to hold the public’s attention, Quentin Tarantino stands apart. The California filmmaker, celebrated for a compact body of work across more than three decades, remains a prolific star in his own right, with a presence that can eclipse even the most famous performers. His extraordinary appeal will be on display again on April 9, when he visits the Coliseum Theater in Barcelona to discuss his new book, Cinema Meditations, from Reservoir Books. Tickets for the event are priced at 94 euros and are nearly sold out. Few filmmakers can pull off a move like this with such consistent impact.
For fans who want to hear the author of Pulp Fiction talk about cinema without paying top dollar, there are more affordable options. Seats costing 89 and 82.50 euros enable attendance from the first and second levels of the Colosseum, though an equally compelling and economical alternative exists: a digital audio recording titled Video Archives. It offers a fascinating, beautifully told narrative experience.
The coolest video store
In 1985, a young Tarantino worked as a clerk at Video Archives, a Manhattan Beach store near Los Angeles that served as a gathering point for film lovers from the South Bay and a thriving community of enthusiasts for B-movies and exploitation cinema. There he formed a friendship with another aspiring filmmaker, Canadian Roger Avary. The two began shooting My Best Friend’s Birthday (1987), a 16-millimeter black-and-white project that quickly grew into a half-length feature, though a fire damaged a portion of the footage.
Not long after, Tarantino drafted a screenplay about an armed robbery that spirals out of control. Through producer Lawrence Bender, he pursued a guerrilla-style shoot using a single location and Video Archives staff in lead roles. The project stalled, with Harvey Keitel being proposed to star and co-produce. The rest is cinema history. Reservoir Dogs arrived in 1992 to widespread acclaim, and Tarantino soon left the video store to partner with Avary, as they explored ideas that would later coalesce into landmark works. The Pulp Fiction screenplay would ultimately win two Academy Awards in 1995.
Tararino’s rise as a prominent director coincided with challenges for Video Archives, which faced bankruptcy and a difficult relocation to Hermosa Beach in 1995. The store closed its doors, but the catalog—approximately 8,000 titles—was sold off, and many former employees kept the spirit of the shop alive by recreating its familiar shelves in the basement of their homes.
Breakage and imprisonment
Their professional rift in late years centered on a dispute over the true authorship of the script for a major project. After parting ways with Avary, Tarantino continued to build his career as a director, screenwriter, and producer, while Avary pursued projects until 2008. He faced legal trouble later, involving a car accident and a DUI, which led to a conviction for involuntary manslaughter.
That difficult period softened Tarantino, and over time the two men began to mend fences. The reconciliation opened doors to renewed collaboration and the exploration of new ventures. From this renewed bond emerged the idea to revive Video Archives in podcast form, where episodes feature Tarantino and Avary selecting two or three films from old video-store collections and discussing them at length. The conversations mix subjective insights with affection for a bygone era of physical media.
Episodes of the Video Archives podcast have appeared since mid‑last year, totaling roughly fifteen installments. The creators celebrate the films of the 1970s and 1980s with a candid, sometimes impassioned defense of cinema just as VHS and other pre-digital formats faced the rise of streaming. Each episode closes with a coda that lets Avary’s daughter explain how to watch the films discussed, while Tarantino himself is kept away from the basement to add an extra layer of playful friction. The podcast affirms the enduring value of the physical format and invites listeners to revisit classic titles in a new light.
Video Archives is available on platforms such as Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts, and can be enjoyed for free on the program’s official website, where the team shares notes, discussions, and behind‑the‑scenes stories.