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Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an auteur indie filmmaker whose films used postmodern nonlinear storylines, and stylized violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004) and Death Proof featured in Grindhouse (2007). In January of 1992 a film titled Reservoir Dogs (1992) hit the Sundance Film festival. The writer-director was a first-timer by the name of Quentin Tarantino. The film garnered critical acclaim and the director became a legend in the England, UK and the cult film circuit. Two years later he followed up 'Dogs' with the film Pulp Fiction (1994). 'Pulp' premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it won the coveted 'Palme D'Or' the virtual equal of the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. At the 1995 Academy Awards, 'Pulp' was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, also for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, among others. Tarantino and writing partner Roger Avary came away with the award only for Best Original Screenplay. In 1995, Tarantino directed one fourth of the Anthology Four Rooms (1995) with friends and fellow auteurs Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Allison Anders. That film was released on December 25th in the United States to very weak reviews. This is mainly due to the heavy cutting of the first two segments and the introduction which make much of the plotline unintelligible, and creates a complete mess out of the second segment, directed by Alexandre Rockwell. The best two segments of the film are Robert Rodriguez's and Tarantino's. Tarantino's next film was From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), a crime/vampire film which he wrote and co-starred with George Clooney. The film did fairly well theatrically. Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie Zastoupil (née McHugh), a health care executive and nurse, and Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician born in Queens, New York. Tarantino's father is Italian American and his mother had part Cherokee Native American ancestry. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of 16, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. This proved to be influential in his movie-making career. At the age of 22, he landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives, a now defunct video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California where he and fellow movie buffs like Roger Avary spent all day discussing and recommending films to customers. The career of Quentin Tarantino instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend. His improbable story incorporates plot elements previously encountered in earlier "boy wonder" lore—like the youthful adventures of Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg—but much like this unlikely celebrity's rapid-fire vocal delivery, the pace has been greatly accelerated. By 2003, Tarantino had helmed only four feature films and one segment of a poorly received omnibus film, which would hardly seem to justify the book-length studies of the filmmaker's work or his considerable influence on a generation of subsequent writers and directors. Of course, winning the Oscar, Golden Globe and numerous critics' awards for Best Original Screenplay for the groundbreaking and much-imitated "Pulp Fiction" (1994) added significantly to his luster. Not bad for a high school dropout who picked up much of his film education while working as a video store clerk. For better or worse, the entertainment press has selected Tarantino as the symbol of a new generation of young directors of popular films. Hailed by Variety as "the video store generation of filmmakers,” these would-be auteurs learned what they know about moviemaking and film history by watching VHS tapes on television, not at film school. A minimum wage job behind a video store counter became a road to a treasure trove of cinematic expression—particularly if one worked, as Tarantino did, at a well-stocked outfit like Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. Cinephiles rather than cineastes, these young buffs tended to have rather catholic if idiosyncratic tastes. One could see influences of everything from arcane Hong Kong action titles to French New Wave classics in Tarantino's work. Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, TN. His father—a sometime actor—left the his family before Tarantino was born. When he was two years old, him and his mother left Knoxville and settled in Los Angeles, CA. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, Tarantino held a succession of odd jobs before finding his niche at Video Archives where for five years he regaled customers, including many low-profile industry players, with his passionate opinions and recommendations. There Tarantino first met the film school-trained Roger Avary, his future collaborator on the screenplays for "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), "True Romance" (1993) and "Pulp Fiction" (the exact nature of their work together has remained in dispute). Tarantino's screenplay True Romance was optioned and eventually released in 1993. After Tarantino met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged Tarantino to write a screenplay. In January 1992 Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs hit the Sundance Film festival. The film garnered critical acclaim and the director became a legend in the UK and the cult film circuit. Reservoir Dogs was a dialogue-driven heist movie that set the tone for his later films. Tarantino wrote the script in three and a half weeks and Bender forwarded it to director Monte Hellman. Hellman helped Tarantino to secure funding from Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment (which later became Artisan). Harvey Keitel read the script and also contributed to funding, took a co-producer role, and a part in the movie. The second script that Tarantino sold was Natural Born Killers. Director Oliver Stone made a number of changes that Tarantino disagreed with. As a result, Tarantino disowned the script. Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black. He instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival. Pulp Fiction earned Tarantino and Roger Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. After Pulp Fiction he directed episode four of Four Rooms, "The Man from Hollywood", a tribute to an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen. Four Rooms was a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez. The film was very poorly received by critics and audiences. He also starred in and wrote the script for Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, which saw mixed reviews from the critics yet led to two sequels, for which Tarantino and Rodriguez would only serve as executive producers. Tarantino's third feature film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by Elmore Leonard. An homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre's films of the 1970s. In 1998, he turned his attention to the Broadway stage, where he starred in a revival of Wait Until Dark. He had then planned to make the war film Inglorious Bastards, but postponed it to write and direct Kill Bill (released as two films, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of Wuxia (Chinese martial arts), Jidaigeki (Japanese period cinema), Spaghetti Westerns and Italian horror or giallo. It was based on a character (The Bride) and a plot that he and Kill Bill's lead actress, Uma Thurman, had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction. In 2004, Tarantino returned to Cannes where he served as President of the Jury. Kill Bill was not in competition, but it did screen on the final night in its original 3-hour-plus version. Tarantino announced in 2005 that his next project would be Grindhouse, which he co-directed with Rodriguez. Released in theaters on April 6, 2007, Tarantino's contribution to the Grindhouse project was titled Death Proof. It began as a take on 1970s slasher films, but evolved dramatically as the project unfolded. Ticket sales performed significantly below box office analysts' expectations despite mostly positive critic reviews. He has stated his next film will "probably" be Inglorious Bastards, which is a World War II film, but that he needed to spend another year working on the script before filming. Also, Quentin has divulged information about possible anime prequels to the Kill Bill films. These would probably center around the DiVAS, Bill or The Bride before the events of the first two films. In a recent interview with The Telegraph he mentioned an idea for a form of spaghetti western set in America's Deep South which he calls "a southern". Stating that he wanted "to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to".There have also been rumors of a film about two characters from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Vic and Vincent Vega. This would be The Vega Brothers but this has only been hinted at, along with April Fools rumors posted on the internet about Pulp Fiction 2: The Valley Of Darkness. In 2007 he claimed that the Vega Brothers project (which he intended to call Double V Vega) is "kind of unlikely now". Among his current producing credits are the horror flick Hostel (which included numerous references to his own Pulp Fiction), the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot (for which Tarantino had once written a script) and Hell Ride (written & directed by Kill Bill star Larry Bishop). Tarantino is credited as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro of Robert Rodriguez's 2005 neo-noir film Sin City. In 2005 Quentin Tarantino won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards. On August 15, 2007, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presented Tarantino with a lifetime achievement award at the Malacañang Palace in Manila. Tarantino has been quoted as saying "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'" Tarantino directed the fourth season finale to the hit show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which first aired May 19, 2005. The highly rated episode, entitled "Grave Danger", shared a very similar situation from Tarantino's second Kill Bill film: CSI Nick Stokes is captured and buried alive in a Plexiglas coffin while an Internet camera broadcasts the whole thing to CSI headquarters. (In Kill Bill Vol. 2, the Bride was also captured and buried alive in a coffin.) The episode was delayed in being shown in the UK as the broadcast date coincided with the terrorist attacks in London and it was felt that the underground theme in the episode would cause offense. This double-length episode was released on DVD on October 10, 2005. Tarantino was nominated for an Emmy for his role in this episode. Tarantino also directed an episode of ER called "Motherhood" that aired May 11, 1995, an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and an episode of then-girlfriend Margaret Cho's show. Tarantino was also featured as a guest judge on the televised singing competition American Idol for one episode during its third season. His reputation for creating memorable movie soundtracks was cited as qualifying him for the role. Tarantino also directed the season 20 (1994–1995 season) episode of the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live hosted by John Travolta (musical guest: Seal), which featured a sketch called "Quentin Tarantino's Welcome Back, Kotter" a hybrid of the 1970s sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter (which starred John Travolta) and Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs and hosted an episode of SNL in season 21 (1995–1996 season) with musical guest The Smashing Pumpkins. Tarantino was originally slated to direct an episode of the X-Files, but was prevented from doing so by the Directors Guild of America.[citation needed] The episode, titled "Never Again," features Scully heading to Philadelphia (with Mulder on vacation) to talk to a man who claims his tattoo is talking to him. The episode was written specifically for Tarantino to direct. As a result, both the tone and character dynamic stand out as being slightly out of step with the series. The DGA contended that Tarantino (who is not a member) failed to compensate the union for lost revenue as a result of his directorial work on ER. Continuing to demonstrate his love of a wide-ranging array of pop culture icons, Tarantino stepped behind the camera to direct the 2005 season finale of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," which featured the final TV performance of Frankl Gorshin and, like "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," a plot centering around a cast member being buried alive. After scoring an Emmy nomination his “CSI” stint, Tarantino expressed interest in assembling a limited-run series for which he'd write and direct all 12 episodes, "like one big arc/novel." As a performer, he next cameoed as himself in the enchanting ABC telepic "The Muppets' 'Wizard of Oz'" (2005) and made three guest appearances as former SD-6 agent-turned-international criminal McKenas Cole on one of his favorite TV shows, "Alias" (ABC, 2001-06). A great interview subject, Tarantino has quickly cultivated an intriguing public persona. He enjoys dual status as the "film geek who made good" and the reigning avatar of postmodern "cool.” The latter quality is conveyed by the playful hipster tone of his protagonists, their retro clothing, a mastery of pop culture allusions and killer soundtracks. Eventually, the mere fact that Tarantino liked a particular film or performer became a marketable selling point. Tarantino also showed his canny mastery of self-promotion, reviving his fading image as the poster boy for bad boy cinema—he was famously sued by producer Don Murphy for $5,000,000, accused of assault after Tarantino attacked Murphy in restaurant, slammed him against the wall and punched him in 1997—when he appeared apparently tipsy on Jay Leno's "The Tonight Show" while promoting "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" in 2003. Tarantino next added his name to Eli Roth’s second feature, “Hostel” (2006), a brutal horror flick about two American college buddies (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) lured to an out-of-the-way hostel in a Slovakian town rumored to house desperate, but beautiful Eastern European women. Following their wrong heads, both Americans get trapped in a truly sinister situation that plunges them into the dark recesses of human nature. Tarantino teamed up with directing pal Robert Rodriguez once more to direct “Grindhouse” (2007), a compilation of two 90-minute long horror flicks helmed by both directors that was a throwback to the days of bloody, sex-fueled, low-rent double features that played in seedy 42nd Street theaters in New York City. Tarantino’s offering was a slasher-cum-road rage flick called “Death Proof,” starring Kurt Russell a crazed killer who tries to mow down young women—including Rosario Dawson and Zoë Bell—in a black Chevy Nova. Despite widespread attention lavished on the film—including exhaustive rounds made to various media outlets by Tarantino—“Grindhouse” failed to generate a large crowd to theaters—even some of the ones who did show up walked out halfway after Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” segment thinking the movie was over. Although Tarantino is best known for his work behind the camera, he has appeared in his own movies Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Death Proof as minor characters, and co-starred alongside George Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn. He has also appeared on the small screen in the first and third seasons of the TV show Alias. Tarantino once played an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls (as a non-speaking extra. He can, in fact, barely be seen). He also played cameo roles in Desperado (directed by his friend Robert Rodriguez), and Little Nicky (as a crazy, blind, apocalypse preacher). In November 2006, an episode of the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts features Quentin Tarantino interviewing and spending time with singer Fiona Apple. Tarantino also has a brief appearance in the beginning of Spike Lee's film Girl 6. In April 2007, Tarantino has substantial screen-time in Grindhouse's double-features, Death Proof and Planet Terror, where he respectively takes on the roles of Warren, a bartender, and The Rapist, an infected member of a rogue military unit. He also starred as Johnny Destiny in the film Destiny Turns on the Radio. Tarantino's movies are renowned for their sharp dialogue, splintered chronology, and pop culture obsessions. His films have copious amounts of both spattered and flowing blood that are graphically violent in an aestheticized sense. His depictions of violence have also been noted for their casualness and macabre humour, as well as for the tension and grittiness of these scenes. In the 2002 Sight and Sound Directors' poll, Tarantino revealed his top-twelve films: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Rio Bravo; Taxi Driver; His Girl Friday; Rolling Thunder; They All Laughed; The Great Escape; Carrie; Coffy; Dazed and Confused; Five Fingers of Death; and Hi Diddle Diddle. A previous top-ten list also included Blow Out, One-Eyed Jacks, For a Few Dollars More, Bande à part, Breathless (1983 film), Le Doulos, They Live By Night, GoodFellas and The Long Goodbye. Tarantino also credits Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, and George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead as strong influences. He is also a huge fan of the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, whose influence can be found in Kill Bill. He owns a rare 35 mm copy of Manos: The Hands of Fate, which he cites as his favorite "comedy". He is known as a Godzilla fan. He has also been a supporter of Kevin Smith's work, being that Smith hit success with Clerks around the time Tarantino released Pulp Fiction. Tarantino also cited Smith's Chasing Amy as his favorite movie of 1997. In one of the Train Wreck making-of shorts for Smith's Clerks II, we see that he invited Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to a private screening of the film at the View Askew offices. In August 2007, while teaching a four-hour film course during the 9th Cinemanila International Film Festival in Manila, Tarantino cited Filipino directors Cirio Santiago, Eddie Romero, and Gerry de Leon as icons of his in the 1970s: He could hardly contain himself from raving over De Leon's "soul-shattering, life-extinguishing" movies on vampires and female bondage, particularly Women in Cages. "It is just harsh, harsh, harsh," he said, and described the final shot as one of "devastating despair". He has been quoted as saying that Rio Bravo is his favorite movie. He said "When I'm getting serious with a girl, I show her Rio Bravo, and if she doesn't like it, it's over." He also credits Brian De Palma and Howard Hawks as two of his favorite directors in a 1994 interview. Tarantino often makes references to and features music from cult movies and television. He often features a character singing along to a song from the soundtrack: Mr. Blonde, "Stuck in the Middle With You" — Stealers Wheel; Butch, "Flowers on the Wall" — The Statler Brothers; Mia Wallace, "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" — Urge Overkill; Elle Driver, "Twisted Nerve" — Bernard Herrmann; Max Cherry, "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" - The Delfonics; Jackie Brown, "Across 110th Street" - Bobby Womack; Butterfly, "Down In Mexico" - The Coasters; Jungle Julia and her friends, "Hold Tight" - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Tarantino worked in a video rental store prior to becoming a filmmaker, paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent, and has cited that experience as his inspiration for his directorial career. Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous entertainers, including Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino, directors Allison Anders and Sofia Coppola, actresses Julie Dreyfus and Shar Jackson and comedians Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, whom he has referred to as his "muse".However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic. He has never married and has no children. One of Tarantino's closest friends is fellow director Robert Rodriguez (the pair often refer to each other as brothers). Their biggest collaborations have been From Dusk Till Dawn (written by Tarantino, directed by Rodriguez), Four Rooms (they both wrote and directed segments of the film), Sin City and Grindhouse. It was Tarantino who suggested that Rodriguez name the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as a homage to the titles Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon A Time In America by Sergio Leone. They are both members of A Band Apart, a production company that also features directors John Woo and Luc Besson. Rodriguez scored Kill Bill: Volume 2 for one dollar, and the favor was returned in kind, with Tarantino directing a scene in Rodriguez's 2005 film Sin City for the same fee. Rodriguez was also responsible for introducing Tarantino to digital film. Prior to this, Tarantino was a vocal supporter of using traditional celluloid film. Tarantino is also good friends with The RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan who composed the musical score for Kill Bill. Tarantino is a friend of Japanese director Takashi Miike, whom he asked to perform a cameo in Eli Roth's film Hostel. As a favor for Miike doing so, Tarantino appears in the opening action sequence of Miike's movie Sukiyaki Western: Django, released in August 2007. In a Playboy interview, he talked of smoking cannabis and using ecstasy while filming Kill Bill. For his 45th birthday, he shared a joint party in Las Vegas with Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. |
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