Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American filmmaker, actor, and author. His films are characterized by graphic violence, extended dialogue often featuring much profanity, and references to popular culture. His work has earned a cult following alongside critical and commercial success; he has been named by some as the most influential director of his generation and has received numerous awards and nominations, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. His films have grossed more than $1.9 billion worldwide.
Tarantino began his career with the independent crime film Reservoir Dogs. His second film, the crime comedy-drama Pulp Fiction, was a major success and won numerous awards, including the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He next wrote and starred in the action horror film From Dusk till Dawn. His third film as director, Jackie Brown, paid homage to blaxploitation films.
Tarantino wrote and directed the martial arts films Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, with both volumes combined regarded as a single film. He then made the exploitation-slasher film Death Proof, which was part of a double feature with From Dusk till Dawn director Robert Rodriguez, released under the collective title Grindhouse. His next film, Inglourious Basterds, followed an alternate account of World War II. He followed this with Django Unchained, a slave revenge Spaghetti Western which won him his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His eighth film, The Hateful Eight, was a revisionist Western thriller and opened to audiences with a roadshow release.
Tarantino's ninth and most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was a comedy-drama set in the late 1960s about the transition of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood; his debut novel, a novelization of the film, was published in 2021. He has tentative plans for his tenth film to be his last before retiring from filmmaking.
Early life
Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 27, 1963, the only child of Connie McHugh and aspiring actor Tony Tarantino, who left the family before his son's birth. He has claimed to have Cherokee ancestry through his mother, who was also of Irish descent, while his father was Italian-American. He was named in part after Quint Asper, Burt Reynolds's character in the TV series Gunsmoke. Tarantino's mother met his father during a trip to Los Angeles; after a brief marriage and divorce, she left Los Angeles and moved to Knoxville, where her parents lived, and returned to Los Angeles with her son in 1966.Tarantino's mother married musician Curtis Zastoupil soon after arriving in Los Angeles, and the family moved to nearby Torrance, California. Zastoupil accompanied Tarantino to numerous film screenings while his mother allowed him to see more mature movies, such as Carnal Knowledge and Deliverance. After his mother divorced Zastoupil in 1973 and received a misdiagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma, Tarantino was again sent to live with his grandparents in Knoxville. Less than a year later, he returned to Torrance.
At the age of 14, Tarantino wrote one of his earliest works, a screenplay called Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit that was based on the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit. He later revealed that his mother had ridiculed his writing skills when he was younger, and he subsequently vowed never to share any of his future wealth with her. As a 15-year-old, he was grounded by his mother for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch from a Kmart. He was allowed to leave only to attend the Torrance Community Theater, where he participated in such plays as Two Plus Two Makes Sex and Romeo and Juliet. The same year, he dropped out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City.
Career
1980–1989: Early jobs and screenplays
Through the 1980s, Tarantino had a number of jobs. After lying about his age, he worked as an usher at an adult movie theater in Torrance, called the Pussycat Theater. He spent time as a recruiter in the aerospace industry, and for five years he worked at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, California. He was well known in the local community for his film knowledge and video recommendations; Tarantino stated, "When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, 'No, I went to films." In 1986, Tarantino was employed in his first Hollywood job, working with Video Archives colleague Roger Avary, as production assistants on Dolph Lundgren's exercise video, Maximum Potential.Before working at Video Archives, Tarantino co-wrote Love Birds In Bondage with Scott Magill. Tarantino would go on to produce and direct the short film. Magill committed suicide in 1987, after which all film shot was destroyed. Later, Tarantino attended acting classes at the James Best Theatre Company, where he met several of his eventual collaborators for his next film. In 1987, Tarantino co-wrote and directed My Best Friend's Birthday. It was left uncompleted, but some of its dialogue was included in True Romance.
The following year, he played an Elvis impersonator in "Sophia's Wedding: Part 1", an episode in the fourth season of The Golden Girls, which was broadcast on November 19, 1988. Tarantino recalled that the pay he received for the part helped support him during the preproduction of Reservoir Dogs; he estimated he was initially paid about $650 but went on to receive about $3,000 in residuals over three years because the episode was frequently rerun due to it being on a "best of..." lineup.
1990–1999: Breakthrough and acclaim
After meeting Lawrence Bender at a friend's barbecue, Tarantino discussed with him about an unwritten dialogue-driven heist film. Bender encouraged Tarantino to write the screenplay, which he wrote in three and a half weeks and presented to Bender unformatted. Impressed with the script, Bender managed to forward it through contacts to director Monte Hellman. Hellman cleaned up the screenplay and helped secure funding from Richard N. Gladstein at Live Entertainment. Harvey Keitel read the script and also contributed to the budget, taking a role as co-producer and also playing a major part in the picture. In January 1992, it was released as Tarantino's crime thriller Reservoir Dogs—which he wrote, directed, and acted in as Mr. Brown—and screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was an immediate hit, receiving a positive response from critics.Tarantino's screenplay True Romance was optioned and the film was eventually released in 1993. The second script that Tarantino sold was for the film Natural Born Killers, which was revised by Dave Veloz, Richard Rutowski and director Oliver Stone. Tarantino was given story credit and stated in an interview that he wished the film well, but later disowned the final film. Tarantino also did an uncredited rewrite on It's Pat. Other films where he was an uncredited screenwriter include Crimson Tide and The Rock.
Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by major film studios and offered projects that included Speed and Men in Black, but he instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction. Tarantino wrote, directed, and acted in the dark comedy crime film Pulp Fiction in 1994, maintaining the graphic depiction of violence from his earlier film as well as the non-linear storylines. Tarantino received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which he shared with Roger Avary, who contributed to the story. He also received a nomination in the Best Director category. The film received another five nominations, including for Best Picture. Tarantino also won the Palme d'Or for the film at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. The film grossed over $200 million and earned positive reviews.
In 1995, Tarantino participated in the anthology film Four Rooms, a collaboration that also included directors Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. Tarantino directed and acted in the fourth segment of "The Man from Hollywood", a tribute to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Man from the South". He joined Rodriguez again later in the year with a supporting role in Desperado. One of Tarantino's first paid writing assignments was for From Dusk till Dawn, which Rodriguez directed later in 1996, re-teaming with Tarantino in another acting role, alongside Harvey Keitel, George Clooney and Juliette Lewis. His third feature film was Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. A homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of the films of that genre in the 1970s. It received positive reviews and was called a "comeback" for Grier and co-star Robert Forster. Leonard considered Jackie Brown to be his favorite of the 26 different screen adaptations of his novels and short stories.
In the 1990s, Tarantino had a number of other minor acting roles, including in Eddie Presley, The Coriolis Effect, Sleep With Me, Somebody to Love, All-American Girl, Destiny Turns on the Radio, and Girl 6. Also in 1996, he starred in Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair, a simulation video game that uses pre-generated film clips. In 1998, Tarantino made his major Broadway stage debut as an amoral psycho killer in a revival of the 1966 play Wait Until Dark, which received unfavorable reviews for his performance from critics.
2000–2009: Subsequent success
Tarantino went on to write and direct Kill Bill, a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of Chinese martial arts films, Japanese period dramas, Spaghetti Westerns, and Italian horror. It was based on a character called The Bride and a plot that he and Kill Bills lead actress Uma Thurman had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction. It was originally set for a single theatrical release, but its four-hour running time prompted Tarantino to divide it into two movies. Tarantino says he still considers it a single film in his overall filmography. Volume 1 was released in 2003 and Volume 2 was released in 2004.From 2002 to 2004, Tarantino portrayed villain McKenas Cole in the ABC television series Alias. In 2004, Tarantino attended the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where he served as president of the jury. Volume 2 of Kill Bill had a screening there, but was not in competition. Tarantino then contributed to Robert Rodriguez's 2005 neo-noir film Sin City, and was credited as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence featuring Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro. In May 2005, Tarantino co-wrote and directed "Grave Danger", the fifth season finale of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. For this episode, Tarantino was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series at the 57th Primetime Emmy Awards.
In 2007, Tarantino directed the exploitation slasher film Death Proof. Released as a take on 1970s double features, under the banner Grindhouse, it was co-directed with Rodriguez who did the other feature which was the body horror film Planet Terror. Box-office sales were low but the film garnered mostly positive reviews.
Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds, released in 2009, is the story of a group of Jewish-American guerrilla soldiers in Nazi-occupied France in an alternate history of World War II. He had planned to start work on the film after Jackie Brown but postponed this to make Kill Bill after a meeting with Uma Thurman. Filming began on "Inglorious Bastards", as it was provisionally titled, in October 2008. The film opened in August 2009 to positive reviews with the highest box office gross in the US and Canada for the weekend on release. For the film, Tarantino received his second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.