Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, actor, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an auteur indie filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines, edgy tough-guy dialogue, and stylized violence interwoven with often-obscure cinematic references. 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).
Early life Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Tony Tarantino, is an Italian American actor and musician. His mother, Connie McHugh, worked for a home medical organization and had part Cherokee Native American ancestry. Mel Kiper Jr. is Quentin's uncle on his mother's side. Shortly after Quentin's birth, his mother married musician Curt Zastoupil, with whom Quentin would form a strong bond. He started kindergarten in 1968. In 1971, the family moved to El Segundo, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, where Tarantino attended Hawthorne Christian School. At the age of 14, he wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of sixteen, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. This proved to be influential in his movie-making career
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In 1984, Tarantino started working the counter at the Video Archives, a Manhattan Beach video store. Tarantino befriended Roger Avary, a fellow employee with whom he would later collaborate. While he continued to study acting at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills, he began to concentrate on screenwriting.
Film career 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 film. The end product was Reservoir Dogs (1992), 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. The success of Pulp Fiction also helped to revive the career of John Travolta. Pulp Fiction earned Tarantino and Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture.
Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney as the Gecko brothers in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).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 is 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 next film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by his mentor Elmore Leonard. A homage to blaxploitation films, it also 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. However, he postponed that 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. The Palme d'Or that year went to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Tarantino is given credit as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro of the 2005 neo-noir film Sin City. In 2005, Tarantino announced his next project would be Grindhouse, which he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. It was released in theaters on April 6 2007. 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. Reportedly, one of the scripts he wrote for Inglorious Bastards would, if filmed complete, make for an 8 hour long film[citation needed]. 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" [1]. 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 rumours posted on the internet about Pulp Fiction 2: The Valley Of Darkness. In 2007 he claimed that the Vega Brothers project (which he intended on called Double V Vega is "kind of unlikely now." [2] 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 (which Tarantino had once written a script for) and Hell Ride (written & directed by Kill Bill star Larry Bishop). In 2005 Quentin Tarantino won the "Icon of the Decade" award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards.
Filmography Director Shorts and TV: My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) ER (1995) Season 1; Episode 24: "Motherhood" (Director) Jimmy Kimmel Live (2004) 20 April 2004 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2005) '"Grave Danger: Vols. I & II" Feature films: Reservoir Dogs (1992) Pulp Fiction (1994) Jackie Brown (1997) Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004) Inglorious Bastards (TBA) Come Drink With Me (TBA) Collaborative films: Four Rooms (segment "The Man from Hollywood") (1995) Sin City (2005) (Special Guest Director) Grindhouse (Death Proof segment) (2007)
Writer My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) Past Midnight (1992) (uncredited rewrite) Reservoir Dogs (1992) True Romance (1993) Pulp Fiction (1994) Natural Born Killers (1994) (Story credit, Writer of Original Draft) It's Pat (1994) (uncredited rewrite)[citation needed] Crimson Tide (1995) (uncredited rewrite) Four Rooms (segment "The Man from Hollywood") (1995) The Rock (1996) (uncredited rewrite)[citation needed] From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Curdled (1996) (uncredited Gecko Brothers news report) Jackie Brown (1997) (rewrite from novel) Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2005) '"Grave Danger: Vols. I & II" (Story credit) Hostel (2006) (uncredited rewrite)[citation needed] Grindhouse (Death Proof segment) (2007) Inglorious Bastards (TBA) Actor My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) Clarence Pool Reservoir Dogs (1992) Mr. Brown Pulp Fiction (1994) Jimmie Dimmick Sleep With Me (1994) Sid Destiny Turns On the Radio (1995) Johnny Destiny Four Rooms (segment "The Man from Hollywood") Chester Rush Desperado (1995) Pick-up Guy From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Richie Gecko Girl 6 (1996) Q.T Jackie Brown (1997) Default Answering Machine voice Little Nicky (2000) Deacon Alias (TV Series) (2001) McKenas Cole BaadAsssss Cinema (2002) (documentary) Kill Bill (2003) Crazy 88 member Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) (documentary) The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005) Kermits Director Grindhouse (2007) Rapist #1 (Planet Terror segment)/The Bartender (Death Proof) Sukiyaki Western: Django (2007) Ringo Producer My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) Past Midnight (1992) Iron Monkey (1993) (2001 U.S. release) Killing Zoe (1994) Four Rooms (1995) From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Curdled (1996) God Said, 'Ha!' (1998) From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999) From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000) Daltry Calhoun (2005) Freedom's Fury (2005) Hostel (2006) Killshot (2007) Grindhouse (2007) Hell Ride (2007) Hostel: Part II (2007) Presenter Iron Monkey (1993) (2001 U.S. release) Hero (2002) (2004 U.S. release) Hostel (2005) The Protector (2005) (2006 in U.S. release) Hostel: Part II (2007)
