It's a cliché by now to say someone from outside the world of music is a "rock star." But Quentin Tarantino? Hate to say it, but... complete and total rock star. Tarantino did an autograph signing Thursday night at Hollywood's Amoeba Records for the first 300 fans who'd signed up for an Inglourious Basterds soundtrack-and-midnight-screening package. And if you wracked your brain, you might be able to think of two or three other filmmakers who'd have been greeted with the same kind of Staples Center-like ovation QT got upon strutting onto the Amoeba stage. But certainly Spielberg, Scorsese, or Lucas wouldn't have actually worked the crowd like the frontman of a hair-metal band.

"You guys are true blue!" he shouted over the strains of Dick Dale's "Miserlou" (as made re-famous by the Pulp Fiction soundtrack), to the hundreds of seekers threading through the gigantic record store's aisles. The director stroked the atttendees for their dedication, in very NSFCR (Not Safe for Charlie Rose) language. "You guys are the believers! You guys are the Thursday mother-[expletive]s! [Expletive] those Friday [gay epithet]s! Let's get this STARTED!"

A few hours later, introducing the first midnight show next door at the Cinerama Dome, Tarantino was in similarly amped-up form. "I hope you have a hell of a good time, and you're seeing it at the theater I always meant for you to see it at, man. So, without any further ado, you guys wanna kill some Nazis?" The sold-out house wasn't roaring quite loud enough. "YOU GUYS WANNA [EXPLETIVE] UP SOME NAZIS?" That was more like it. "LET'S BRING IT!"

He certainly has a Blackie Lawless-like way with a crowd. And some might take from that that Tarantino is a man of strictly meat-and-potatoes tastes. But as his cinematic-mixtape soundtracks make clear, that's far from the case. Before the Amoeba signing, I briefly asked Tarantino about some of his choices for the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack, which is almost entirely derived from pre-existing movie music, from some of the most obscure spaghetti-Western scores of Ennio Morricone to David Bowie's theme song for the 1981 horror thriller Cat People.

Is Morricone his favorite film scorer of all time, I asked? "Hands down," he said. Not a lot of mind-reading on my part for that one: Of the 14 selections on the new film's soundtrack CDs, four are Morricone cues—meaning that more than a quarter of the movie's "score," such as it is, is the repurposed work of the Italian maestro that many consider the world's greatest living film composer. Many of the other tracks are in a similar orchestral vein that is not exactly specific to the story's WWII milieu but close enough to avoid discomfort.

There are a couple of notably brash exceptions, though. One is Billy Preston's theme song for the 1972 movie Slaughter. Yes, it's true: Tartantino could remake Wuthering Heights and he'd still have to toss at least one blaxploitation anthem in. (It's only heard as an extremely fleeting bit of instrumental music in the film itself.)

The other, which plays out from start to finish in Basterds, is Bowie's Cat People theme, which you might expect to throw you out of a film set in the mid-1940s—even an alternate-reality version of the mid-1940s. But that wasn't a consideration for Tarantino, who thought it was perfect for a montage in which Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish refugee posing as a French cinema owner, puts on her femme fatale warpaint and gets dressed to kill... quite literally. (It's a good thing the director cast an actress with green eyes, per Bowie's vintage lyrics.) 

Tarantino explained that "Cat People (Putting Out the Fire with Gasoline)" was "one of my favorite ‘80s Bowie songs," but he'd been disappointed by the way filmmaker Paul Schrader supposedly wasted it over the end credits of his 1981 horror remake. He remembers thinking that if he had a song like that, "I'd have built a 20-minute sequence around it!" Time for some adaptive reuse.

"With 'Cat People,' one of the things that's really cool about the way it's used in the movie is... Look, it would have been easy enough to hire some artist to do ‘The Ballad of Shoshanna,' where I used it in the movie. And it could be telling her story in a very on-point, nail-on-the-head kind of way. I hate that crap," he told me. "I hate that! By having it have a second-generation, once-removed quality to it, you're actually shocked at how well the lyrics to ‘Cat People' work to her story. And I think in that way it even plays much more like interior monologue."

In other words: If he'd commissioned a song that specific, you'd be bothered by how specific it is. But if it seems like accidental specificity, it doesn't remove you from the psychological intensity of the scene. 

Never mind that a few cineastes are going to be bothered by any rock & roll song in a World War II movie, period; chances are the film will have lost them long before that. I did have to ask Tarantino if he gave even a second thought to using contemporary music in a period piece, though. "Where I'm coming from," he answered, "is this: Look, never say never, but more than likely, I probably wouldn't have a situation where a character in Inglourious Bastards would flip on an old-timey radio and ‘Cat People' would play. If it's gonna be practical and they're turning on the radio, I will probably have it be period-appropriate. Like I said, never say never! But I probably wouldn't do that, off the top of my head. But if I'm using it as score, then I can use anything. I can have wah-wah music in there. And I do! With the Billy Preston song. Score is completely my choice, all right?"

All right. Tarantino is often either hailed or heckled as a pastiche artist, and that applies to his soundtracks, which are always mix-and-match jobs of existing material. But the control freak in him just can't have it any other way. If ever he were going to hire a composer to do a traditional film score, you'd think it would have been on a period piece like this one. And clearly, he's never going to. "I would much rather work with a music editor than a music composer," he said. "I'm not willing to give anybody that much control."

To that, anyone who works in Hollywood as a film scorer is probably saying: Basterd! But the rest of us get to enjoy another one of Tarantino's best-of-the-20^th-century mixtapes. It's not just Nazis he's [mess]-ing with... it's every convention or custom ever set down about the rules and roles of movie music.