Quentin Tarantino (born March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American screenwriter, film director and actor who rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a fresh and gritty storyteller who brought new life to the most familiar American archetypes.

Career history

Tarantino’s big break came with the sale of his script True Romance, written with Roger Avary, which was made into a film starring Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater. He also wrote the original screenplay for Natural Born Killers, as part of the longer screenplay that True Romance came from, although it was changed significantly by subsequent writers.

The sale of True Romance (1993) garnered him attention. He met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party and Bender encouraged Quentin to go write a film. The end product was Reservoir Dogs. The script was read by director Monte Helman who helped secure funding from Live Entertainment and also Quentin’s directorship of the film. A stylish, witty and blood-soaked heist movie, this set the tone for his later films.

His followup was Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival. It was a complexly plotted film with a similarly brutal wit. It featured many critically acclaimed performances, and was noted for reviving the career of John Travolta.

Tarantino’s next film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of a novel by his mentor Elmore Leonard. An homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who had featured in many of the genre’s films in the 1970s.

In 1998, he turned his attention to the Broadway stage, where he starred in 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 Chinese Wuxia and Japanese cinematic traditions. It was based on a character (The Bride) and plot that he and Kill Bill’s lead actor, Uma Thurman had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction.

Tarantino starred in the first season of the TV show Alias as McKenas Cole, a former SD-6 agent who attempts to take over the offices of SD-6 in order to steal a valuable artifact from its vault. He later appears in season three as an executive of a new terrorist organization called The Covenant.

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 version.

Aesthetics

Tarantino’s movies are renowned for their sharp dialogue, graphic violence, splintered chronology and pop culture obsessions. Fictional brands such as Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burgers from Pulp Fiction have shown up in other movies including Four Rooms, From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill and even Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

Almost as well-known as his movies is his public persona as a motor-mouthed, geeky hipster with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both popular and art-house cinema. The director is also known for his love of breakfast cereal, and many of his movies feature discontinued brands such as Fruite Brute (a spin off of the more popular Franken Berry) in Pulp Fiction and Kaboom in Kill Bill.

Influences

Tarantino is widely known as a director who is very much a ‘film-geek’. He has a vast knowledge of foreign films, genre films and little-known pieces of cinema. He is a declared lover of the exploitation genre, the asian cinema (especially from Hong Kong) and the italian Western. His love to those genres is mirrored in his works, Kill Bill for example features an endless list of movie references, and his movies, at least he sais so, are hommages to all his idols.

In January of 1991 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.

Three 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 ‘93 Academy Awards, ‘Pulp’ was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, in addition Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, among others. Tarantino and writing partner Roger Avary came away with the award only for Best Original Screenplay. (Where Roger uttered his now famous line, “I’ve gotta go pee”.) 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.