Quentin Tarantino's love of old movies is legendary, and in his early years as a filmmaker - when he shook up Hollywood with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs - much was made of his stint working in a video store in California and watching movies nonstop.

But the writer-director-actor - who was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and spent his first two years there before moving with his family to California - started being seduced by films when he moved back to East Tennessee to attend fifth grade.

Tarantino, 44, even gives his hometown credit for piquing his interest in the exploitation movies of the 1970s that inspired him to collaborate with friend and fellow director Robert Rodriguez on Grindhouse.

Grindhouses were rundown theaters that would play diverse lineups of exploitation films and even studio fare into the wee hours of the night, acting as refuges for bums and criminals.

"It pretty much was an urban, city phenomenon," Tarantino said from Los Angeles. "It would be in Kansas City, it would be in Nashville, it would be in New York and L.A. and Detroit. But when you got outside of there, you were talking about drive-ins. That was where the experience was all tied up."

"In the year '73, when I was there, which was right when the kung-fu movies exploded, I couldn't go to Knoxville and see (movies at) the big theaters. I was stuck just watching movies sitting on the grass at the South Clinton Drive-in. But I would look at the newspaper ads."

Grindhouse is a double feature - Planet Terror, a sci-fi horror movie written and directed by Rodriguez, and Death Proof, a gory action thriller written and directed by Tarantino.

Some actors, including Rose McGowan and Tarantino himself, appear in both films. Seeing double was common in exploitation films, Tarantino said.

"You'd go and see two women-in-prison movies made by New World Pictures," he explains. "In one, The Big Dollhouse, Pam Grier was the tough convict girl in the prison. Then you'd watch the other one, Women in Cages, and she's the evil, sadistic lesbian warden.

"Once the exploitation companies found actors they liked, they would use them a lot, and they would usually release those films together. So it was commonplace to see actors playing different roles in the same double features."

Grindhouse boasts a mix of young talent such as McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez and such established stars as Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell. Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, who also collaborated on From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado, Four Rooms and Sin City, found this their most satisfying partnership yet.

While Grindhouse didn't have the budget and technological constraints that the old grindhouse films had (Rodriguez even filmed his segment with digital cameras), Tarantino said he and his friend relished the vibe and would welcome the chance to repeat it.

"It would be great if the film does well and we can continue with that label and just do other types of movies - spaghetti Westerns or blaxploitation movies or different types of action films," he said. "That would be really, really cool if that opportunity presented itself."

This is cache, read story here