Tarantino, Quentin

Tarantino, Quentin (1963- ), American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in South Bay, a sprawling town south of Los Angeles, where he watched many B-movies and Hollywood Westerns. After dropping out of school at the age of 17, he became interested in the films of European art-house cinema directors, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, while working at Video Archives in the Manhattan Beach area of California.

Tarantino’s first screenplay, for True Romance (1993), was written in 1987. After trying unsuccessfully for several years to raise money to direct it himself, he sold the script to Tony Scott, using the proceeds to begin work on Reservoir Dogs (1992). This film brought Tarantino his first major success. Shot, on a very low budget, almost entirely in a concrete warehouse, Reservoir Dogs is the story of the violent aftermath of a jewellery heist. Stylized, picturesque, and extremely violent, its element of humour has led to Tarantino being criticized for glamorizing violence and drug use.

In 1994 Pulp Fiction, which Tarantino wrote and directed, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and he became an international star with the film’s subsequent box-office success. Pulp Fiction uses a non-linear narrative, not often seen in Hollywood films, to tell several interconnected stories about the Los Angeles underworld. The dialogue illustrates Tarantino’s ability to successfully juxtapose light and witty dialogue with violence and dark subject matter. Tarantino also wrote the original screenplay for the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers (1994), which was criticized for its excessive violence. In 1995, he wrote, executive-produced, and acted in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn (1995), about two brothers who go on a crime spree. He also directed a couple of episodes of the hit television series ER, and made a cameo appearance in the Spike Lee film Girl 6 (1996). In 1997 his third feature as director, Jackie Brown, was hailed as a fine addition to his canon. An adaptation of the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, it starred the veteran 1970s actress Pam Grier as an air stewardess caught between police and criminals in a gun-running operation, and included small roles for Michael Keaton and Robert De Niro as well as a major part for Samuel L. Jackson. He returned in 2003 with the bloody martial arts extravaganza Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman as a female assassin who awakes from a coma to seek revenge on the boss who tried to kill her on her wedding day. The film was released in two instalments, the second part in 2004.