Quentin Tarantino recalls his one moviegoing ‘magnificent experience’

Once upon a time in 1972, Quentin Tarantino found his calling.

The “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Pulp Fiction” director, 59, shared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday what he’s always trying to recreate in cinema — thanks to a “magnificent experience” he had at 8 years old while spending time with his mom’s then-boyfriend.

“Especially being the son of a single mother and even at that point, she was living with two of her best friends. So it’s like I’m [in] a house with three young women. So being taken by a football player, like a Rams player, to a Jim Brown movie, in 1972 on a Saturday night in an all-Black theater, except for me, that was probably the most masculine male experience I had ever had in my life,” said Tarantino, while promoting his new book, “Cinema Speculation,” out Tuesday.

Tarantino, as a result, felt: “F—k going camping, this is it. This is way better than f—king fishing. This is cool.’

“Either as a movie consumer — going to movies and being part of an audience or creating movies for an audience — that goal of a Jim Brown movie in 1972 on a Saturday night is always what I’m trying to achieve,” he continued.

Tarantino during his appearance also spoke about “seeing different movies than the other kids were allowed to see” — among them, “M*A*S*H,” “The Godfather,” and “Deliverance,” notorious for its harrowing male rape scene.

“But there was a whole lot of stuff that even though I might not technically have known exactly what the characters were talking about, I got the gist of it,” he recalled. “And I got the gist by how the audience responded.”