Background

Ethnicity: Tarantino's father is of Italian descent, and his mother has Irish and Cherokee ancestry.

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the United States. He is the only child of Connie McHugh, who is part Cherokee and part Irish, and actor of Italian descent, Tony Tarantino, who left the family before Quentin was born. Quentin was named for Quint Asper, Burt Reynolds' character in the CBS series Gunsmoke.

Tarantino's mother met his father during a trip to Los Angeles, where Tony was a law student and would-be entertainer. She married him soon after, to gain independence from her parents, but their marriage was brief. After the divorce, Connie Tarantino left Los Angeles and moved to Knoxville, where her parents lived. In 1966, Tarantino and his mother moved back to Los Angeles.

Tarantino's mother married musician Curtis Zastoupil soon after arriving in Los Angeles, and the family moved to Torrance, a city in Los Angeles County's South Bay area. Zastoupil encouraged Tarantino's love of movies and accompanied him to numerous film screenings. When he was just eight, his mother began taking him to restricted movies such as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Deliverance (1972). He developed an obsession with films. Tarantino's mother allowed him to see movies with adult content, such as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Deliverance (1972). After his mother divorced Zastoupil in 1973 and received a misdiagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma, Tarantino was sent to live with his grandparents in Tennessee. He remained there less than a year before returning to California.

Education

Tarantino studied at Fleming Junior High School, where he took up drama classes. Quentin would attend school in Narbonne but retired shortly after to enter the James Best Theater Company.

Tarantino loathed school, choosing to spend his time watching movies or reading comics rather than studying. The only subject that appealed to him was history. "History was cool and I did well there because it was kind of like the movies," he once told.

His mother reluctantly consented to allow him to drop out of Narbonne High School at age 16 on the condition he gets a job. "I wanted him to see that life without education would not be a picnic." She thought he would return more focused and go onto college. Tarantino with a reported 160 IQ wanted to study acting and felt he could learn more following his own path.

Career

After dropping out of high school, Tarantino worked as an usher at an adult film theater for a time. He also took acting classes. Tarantino eventually landed a job at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. There he worked with Roger Avary, who shared his passion for film. The two even worked on some script ideas together.

During his time at Video Archives, Tarantino worked on several screenplays, including True Romance and Natural Born Killers. He also landed a guest spot on the popular sitcom The Golden Girls, playing an Elvis Presley impersonator. In 1990, Tarantino left Video Archives to work for Cinetel, a production company. Through one of the producers there, he was able to get his script for True Romance in the hands of director Tony Scott. Scott liked Tarantino's script and bought the rights to it.

Working with producer Lawrence Bender, Tarantino was able to secure funding for his directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), for which he had also written the screenplay. Actor Harvey Keitel was impressed when he read the script, saying "I haven't seen characters like these in years." He signed on as an actor and a producer for the project. Other cast members included Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and Tarantino himself.

In 1992, audiences at the Sundance Film Festival were entranced by Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's ultraviolent crime caper gone wrong. He drew inspiration for the project from such classic heist films as Rififi and City on Fire. The independent film helped make Tarantino one of the most talked-about figures in Hollywood. While not a big hit in the United States, it became a popular title on video and did well overseas.

With Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino created an unpredictable thrill ride filled with violence and pop culture references. In one story in the film, John Travolta played Vincent Vega, a hitman assigned to look after his boss's girlfriend (Uma Thurman) - a role that helped resuscitate his then-flagging career. Another part examined Vega's partnership with fellow hitman Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson). And yet another storyline involved Bruce Willis as a boxer. Tarantino managed to successfully interweave all these different stories to make a fascinating film. "His mind works like the Tasmanian Devil on a bullet train. It's so fast that very few people can keep up with his references," actor Eric Stoltz, who played a drug dealer in the film, explained to Los Angeles magazine.

Pulp Fiction was both a commercial and critical success. In the United States, it earned over $108 million at the box office, becoming the first independent film to do so. Pulp Fiction won the prestigious Palme d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994 and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. For his work on the film, Tarantino took home the award for Best Original Screenplay, an honor he had to share with former collaborator Roger Avary. The two had a falling out over the writing credits for the film.

Known for his temper, Tarantino got into a public disagreement with director Oliver Stone. Stone directed Natural Born Killers (1994) and rewrote parts of Tarantino's script. Enraged by the rewrites, Tarantino fought to have his name taken off the film. Stone told the press that the changes were an improvement over the original, which had poor character development. In a related incident, Tarantino slapped one of the producers of Natural Born Killers when he ran into him at Los Angeles restaurant.

In 1995, Tarantino wrote and directed one of the four stories featured in Four Rooms. The other three were handled by other rising independent filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez. After the release of Four Rooms, Tarantino and Rodriguez collaborated on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Tarantino wrote the screenplay for the film and starred opposite George Clooney, the two playing criminals who end up battle vampires. Rodriguez directed the film, which received negative reviews from critics.

Tarantino soon tackled Jackie Brown (1997), a crime thriller starring Pam Grier as a stewardess who gets caught smuggling money for an arms dealer (played by Jackson). A tribute to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the film was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel. Grier herself had appeared in many blaxploitation classics, including Foxy Brown (1974). The film was well-received, with many calling it a more mature work for Tarantino. Critic Leonard Matlin commented that there were "dynamite performances all around" for a cast that also included Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro, and Robert Forster. Not everyone loved the film, however. Fellow filmmaker Spike Lee objected to Tarantino's overuse of a derogatory term for African-Americans in Jackie Brown, publicly complaining in Army Archerd's column in Variety.

After Jackie Brown, Tarantino took a break from filmmaking. He starred on Broadway in 1998 in a revival of Wait Until Dark with Marisa Tomei. It was a bold move for him, as he had never done professional stage work before. Tarantino played a thug who terrorizes a blind woman (played by Tomei), and the critics were less than impressed. The reviews for the production were brutally harsh, and Tarantino was devastated. He felt people on the street were recognizing him as "the one whose acting sucks. I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal. It was not about the play - it was about me, and at a certain point I started getting too thin a skin about the constant criticism."

Tarantino worked on a World War II script during this period. The screenplay "became big and sprawling. It was some of the best stuff I've ever written, but at a certain point, I thought, 'Am I writing a script or am I writing a novel?' I basically ended up writing three World War II scripts. None of them had an ending," he later explained to Vanity Fair.

Instead of tackling his war epic, Tarantino jumped into the world of martial arts films. The idea for Kill Bill was formed by Tarantino and Thurman in a bar during the filming of Pulp Fiction. In 2000, Thurman ran into Tarantino at an Oscar party and asked whether he had made any progress with the idea. He promised her that he would write the script as a birthday present for her, initially saying he would finish in two weeks, though it ended up taking a year. Tarantino had to learn on the fly how to make a kung fu film, working and reworking the sequences as he went along.

Tarantino originally wanted Warren Beatty for the titular "Bill," but he moved on to David Carradine from the television series Kung Fu. The plot focused on revenge, as a female assassin known as the Bride (Thurman) seeks to kill those involved in the savage attack on her and her wedding party. Running over budget and over schedule, Tarantino persevered with the project, shooting so much that he eventually had to create two films. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was released in late 2003, with Kill Bill: Vol. 2 following a few months later.

After Kill Bill, Tarantino dabbled in television. He wrote and directed an episode of the drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in 2005, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. Tarantino then worked with Robert Rodriguez again. The two filmmakers each made their own gory and graphic ode to the B-movies, which were shown together as a double-feature known as Grindhouse (2007). Critics and movie-goers alike were not quite certain what to make of this collaboration, and it flopped at the box office.

Tarantino finally returned to work on his World War II script. In 2009, he released the long-awaited Inglourious Basterds, which focused on a group of Jewish-American soldiers out to destroy as many Nazis as possible. He had wooed Brad Pitt to play the leader of the "Basterds." Some of the reviews were mixed, but Tarantino seemed unfazed by any negative comments. "I respect criticism. But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I'm a better writer than most of the people writing about me," he explained to GQ magazine. He clearly may have known best in this case, as the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including two for Tarantino (for best director and best original screenplay).

Tarantino went on to meet with both commercial and critical success with his action Western Django Unchained, released in late 2012. In the film, Jamie Foxx starred as Django, a freed slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to search for his wife, played by Kerry Washington. Django then has to face off against his wife's plantation owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. Other cast members include Jackson and Jonah Hill. At the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, Tarantino won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for Django Unchained. The film received several other Oscar nominations, including for best picture, cinematography and sound editing.

In 2015, the director revisited the Western theme for The Hateful Eight. Featuring such frequent Tarantino collaborators as Jackson, Roth, and Madsen, the film snagged Golden Globe nominations in several categories.

Four years later, Tarantino delivered his follow-up effort, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Co-starring DiCaprio and Pitt, the film focuses on the former's struggles to remain relevant as an actor in 1969, presenting a twist on the real-life events that led to the infamous Charles Manson family murders. The eagerly anticipated feature reportedly drew a seven-minute standing ovation following its May 2019 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, before its theatrical release in July.

Achievements

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  Tarantino's films have garnered both critical and commercial success as well as a dedicated cult following. He has received many industry awards, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and the Palme d'Or, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy. In 2005, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. Filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich has called him "the single most influential director of his generation". In December 2015, Tarantino received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the film industry.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Pulp Fiction

    (Writer/director Quentin Tarantino delivers an unforgettab...)

    1994
  • Four Rooms

    (Don't miss the fun in this hilariously sexy comedy that h...)

    1995
  • Inglourious Basterds

    (In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of J...)

    2009
  • Grindhouse: Death Proof

    (For Austin's hottest DJ, Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poit...)

    2007
  • From Dusk Till Dawn

    (It's nonstop thrills when George Clooney (The American) a...)

    1996
  • Kill Bill: Volume 2

    (The murderous Bride continues her vengeance quest against...)

    2004
  • Grindhouse: Planet Terror

    (Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City, brings you Pla...)

    2007
  • Reservoir Dogs

    (Critically acclaimed for its raw power and breathtaking f...)

    1992
  • Once upon a Time in Hollywood

    (The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino features a large ense...)

    2019
  • Natural Born Killers

    (A young couple blast their way across the country - and i...)

    1994
  • True Romance

    (In Detroit, loner Clarence marries a call girl named Alab...)

    1993
  • Kill Bill: Volume 1

    (From groundbreaking writer and director Quentin Tarantino...)

    2003
  • Sin City

    (An amazing cast of big-screen favorites is directed by Ro...)

    2005
  • Jackie Brown

    (A female flight attendant becomes a key figure in a plot ...)

    1997
  • The Hateful Eight

    (In The Hateful Eight, a stagecoach hurtles through the wi...)

    2015
  • Django Unchained

    (Winner of 2 Academy Awards including Best Original Screen...)

    2012

Religion

Although religion doesn’t usually appear in Quentin Tarantino films, the concept of faith usually does. Tarantino himself prefers to keep this part of his life private, and he rarely opens up about his beliefs. However, there was one instance where he almost confirmed his religious beliefs.

In one of his interviews, Tarantino said: "I think I was born Catholic, but I was never practiced ... As time has gone on, as I've become a man and made my way further as an adult, I'm not sure how much any of that I believe in. I don't really know if I believe in God, especially not in this Santa Claus character that people seemed to have conjured up."

Politics

Tarantino publicly supported President Barack Obama during his last few years in office and spoke out against racial incidents in the United States. The latter activity included him supporting Black Lives Matter and criticizing police for shooting and killing black civilians (though he later clarified that he had no issues with police in general) and lending his voice to the movement to take down Confederate flags and symbols through the United States in the aftermath of Dylann Roof's mass murder of African Americans, with Tarantino referring to the Confederate logo as "an American swastika".

Views

In the 2012 Sight & Sound directors' poll, Tarantino listed his top 12 films: Apocalypse Now, The Bad News Bears, Carrie, Dazed and Confused, The Great Escape, His Girl Friday, Jaws, Pretty Maids All in a Row, Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, Taxi Driver and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with the last being his favorite. In 2009, he named Kinji Fukasaku's violent action film Battle Royale as his favorite film released since he became a director in 1992. He is also a fan of the 1981 film Blow Out, directed by Brian De Palma, which led to his casting of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino praised Mel Gibson's 2006 film Apocalypto, saying, "I think it's a masterpiece. It was perhaps the best film of that year." Tarantino has also cited the Australian suspense film Roadgames (1981) as another favorite film. Tarantino is also a noted fan of Elaine May's 1987 film Ishtar, despite its reputation as being a notorious box office flop and one of the worst films ever made.

In August 2007, while teaching in a four-hour film course during the 9th Cinemanila International Film Festival in Manila, Tarantino cited Filipino directors Cirio Santiago, Eddie Romero, and Gerardo de León as personal icons from the 1970s. He referred to De Leon's "soul-shattering, life-extinguishing" movies on vampires and female bondage, citing in particular Women in Cages; "It is just harsh, harsh, harsh", he said, and described the final shot as one of "devastating despair". Upon his arrival in the Philippines, Tarantino was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, "I'm a big fan of RP [Republic of the Philippines] cinema."

Tarantino's films often feature graphic violence, a tendency which has sometimes been criticized. His film Reservoir Dogs was initially denied United Kingdom certification because of his use of torture as entertainment. Tarantino has frequently defended his use of violence, saying that "violence is so good. It affects audiences in a big way".

Tarantino has also occasionally used a nonlinear story structure in his films, most notably with Pulp Fiction. He has also used the style in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and The Hateful Eight. Tarantino's script for True Romance was originally told in a nonlinear style before director Tony Scott decided to use a more structured approach. Critics have since referred to the use of this shifting timeline in films as the "Tarantino Effect".

Actor Steve Buscemi has described Tarantino's novel style of filmmaking as "bursting with energy" and "focused". According to Tarantino, a hallmark of all his movies is that there is a different sense of humor in each one, which gets the audience to laugh at things that are not funny. However, he insists that his films are dramas, not comedies.

Tarantino has stated that the celebrated animation-action sequence in Kill Bill (2003) was inspired by the use of 2D animated sequences in actor Kamal Haasan's Tamil film Aalavandhan. He often blends aesthetic elements, in tribute to his favorite films and filmmakers. In Kill Bill, he melds comic strip formulas and aesthetics within a live-action film sequence, in some cases by the literal use of cartoons or anime images.

Tarantino often creates his own products and brands that he uses across his films to varying degrees. His own fictional brands, including "Acuña Boys Tex-Mex Food", "Big Kahuna Burger", "G.O. Juice", "Jack Rabbit Slim's", "K-Billy", "Red Apple cigarettes", "Tenku Brand Beer" and "Teriyaki Donut", replace the use of product placement, sometimes to a humorous degree.

On the biopic genre, Tarantino has said that he has "no respect" for biopics, saying that they "are just big excuses for actors to win Oscars. ... Even the most interesting person – if you are telling their life from beginning to end, it's going to be a fucking boring movie." However, in an interview with Charlie Rose, he said, "There is one story that I could be interested in, but it would probably be one of the last movies I [ever make] ... My favorite hero in American history is John Brown. He's my favorite American who ever lived. He basically single-handedly started the road to end slavery and ... he killed people to do it. He decided, 'If we start spilling white blood, then they're going to start getting the idea.'"

Tarantino has stated in many interviews that his writing process is like writing a novel before formatting it into a script, saying that this creates the blueprint of the film and makes the film feel like literature. About his writing process, he told the website The Talks, "[My] head is a sponge. I listen to what everyone says, I watch little idiosyncratic behavior, people tell me a joke and I remember it. People tell me an interesting story in their life and I remember it. ... when I go and write my new characters, my pen is like an antenna, it gets that information, and all of a sudden these characters come out more or less fully formed. I don't write their dialogue, I get them talking to each other."

Tarantino is also known for his use of music in his films, including soundtracks that often use songs from the 1960s and 70s. In 2011, he was recognized at the 16th Critics' Choice Awards with the inaugural BFCA Critics' Choice Music+Film Award.

In 2013, a survey of 17 academics was carried out to discover which filmmakers had been referenced the most in essays and dissertations on film that had been marked in the previous five years. It revealed that Tarantino was the most-studied director in the UK, ahead of Christopher Nolan, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.

After a series of sexual assault accusations ended the career of producer Harvey Weinstein and sparked the #MeToo movement in late 2017, Tarantino admitted he knew about Weinstein's behavior toward women and expressed regret that he didn't do more to stop it. He was also forced to account for his own alleged misogynistic behavior as a director, including the rumor that he forced Thurman to drive a dangerous stunt car while filming Kill Bill, resulting in a life-changing accident for the actress.

Quotations: "Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it."

"If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it."

"I'm never going to be shy about anything, what I write about is what I know; it's more about my version of the truth as I know it. That's part of my talent, really - putting the way people really speak into the things I write. My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been."

"When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid's private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. It's not my job. It's my calling."

"If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first."

Personality

One of Tarantino's biggest pet peeves while filming is actors and crew members napping on set. In his words "It always kinda bugged me so I came up with something where it wouldn't bug me." That something was a huge purple dildo named "Big Jerry". Whenever an actor or crew member dozes off on set Quentin puts "Big Jerry" as close to the offenders face as he can without waking them and snaps photos that are hung on "The Wall of Shame" on set. Several photos of A-list actors and "Big Jerry" exist. All in good humor and fun according to the director.

Tarantino is a huge fan of the Half-Life computer game series and has considered the possibilities of directing a movie adaptation.

In 2018, Oxford English Dictionary added term "Tarantinoesque" into its collection and described Tarantinoesque films as "characterized by graphic and stylized violence, non-linear storylines, cineliterate references, satirical themes, and sharp dialogue".

Although he uses both elements in his films, Tarantino strongly detests violence and drugs. He stated in a radio interview that the one thing he cannot stand seeing in movies is real animal and insect death or torture and that real acts of violence have no place in the film industry, which is about realism through artifice.

Quentin has an apparent foot fetish. Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill both featured Uma Thurman’s feet (he once drank champagne from her Louboutins), and he even made a cameo where he sucked Salma Hayek’s toes in the 1996 movie From Dusk Till Dawn.

Physical Characteristics: Quentin Tarantino ha a height of 6 ft 1 in or 185 cm, and a weight of 90 kg or 198.5 lbs. He also has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes.

Interests

• Foot fetish

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Aristotle, John Brown

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Writers

  Boris Pasternak, Elmore Leonard

• Artists

  Jean-Pierre Melville, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Uma Thurman

• Music & Bands

  Bob Dylan, Freda Payne, Elvis Presley, Phil Ochs, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Jack Nitzsche, David Bowie, Ennio Morricone, ZZ Top, Johnny Cash, Soundgarden

Connections

On June 30, 2017, Tarantino became engaged to Israeli singer Daniella Pick, daughter of musician Svika Pick. They met when Tarantino was in Israel to promote Inglourious Basterds in 2009. They married on November 28, 2018, in a Reform Jewish ceremony. In August 2019 the couple announced, that they are expecting a baby.

Father:

Tony Tarantino

Quentin has mentioned over and over again how he does not consider his relationship with his father to be very good. He claims that Tony was an absentee dad and Quentin never got to know him. Tony is a musician, an actor and a cinematographer. He is the sole owner of Tarantino Productions LLC which was set up together with his late dad Dominic.

Mother:

Connie McHugh

Spouse:

Daniella Pick

In 2009, Tarantino was at Israel to promote his movie Inglourious Basterds (2009) and that was where he met Pick. She is the daughter of the Israeli pop singer Svika Pick and they soon started dating. Daniella is a musician like her father and just recently became engaged to the iconic director.

colleague:

Brad Pitt

colleague:

Samuel Jackson

colleague:

Madonna Ciccone

colleague:

Benicio del Toro

colleague:

Leonardo DiCaprio

colleague:

Margot Robbie

References

• Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies
  1995