Quentin Tarantino

Image:Quentin Tarantino.jpg Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, actor, and Oscar winning screenwriter who rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a stylish auteur whose bold use of nonlinear storylines, memorable dialogue, and bloody violence brought new life to familiar American film archetypes.

He is the most famous of the young directors behind the independent film revolution of the 1990s, well-known for his public persona as a motor-mouthed, geeky hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of both popular and art-house cinema.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career history 3 Aesthetics 4 Influences 5 Criticism 6 Trivia 7 Trademarks 8 Filmography 8.1 Director 8.2 Writer 8.3 Actor 8.4 Producer 9 Presented By... 10 See also 11 References 12 External links

Early life

Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee to Tony Tarantino, an actor and musician of Italian descent, and Connie McHugh of half-Irish and half-Cherokee Indian extraction, who, shortly after his birth married musician Curt Zastoupil with whom Quentin would form a strong bond. He attended kindergarten in San Gabriel Valley from 1968. In 1971 the family moved to El Segundo, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles where Tarantino attended Hawthorne Christian School. 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. At the age of 22, he wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. In 1984, Tarantino started working at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives where he struck up a friendship with fellow worker Roger Avary with whom he would later collaborate. He continued to study acting at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills but began to concentrate mainly on script writing.

Career history

While employed as a video store clerk, Tarantino penned the script for "From Dusk Till Dawn." He sold the script to a movie make-up company for $1,500.00 and the promise to do the make-up on a future film that would turn out to be "Reservoir Dogs." His first major break came with the sale of another script called True Romance, written with Roger Avary. It 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. It should be acknowledged that it was changed significantly by subsequent writers (including Oliver Stone), so much so that he declined a Screenwriting credit in lieu of a Story credit.

The sale of True Romance (eventually released in 1993) garnered him attention. He met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party and Bender encouraged Tarantino to go write a film. The end product was Reservoir Dogs (1992), a stylish, witty, and blood-soaked heist movie that set the tone for his later films. The script was read by director Monte Hellman who helped secure funding from Live Entertainment and also Tarantino's directorship of the film. Harvey Keitel heard of the script through his wife, who attended a class with Tarantino. He read the script and also contributed to funding, took an Executive Producer role, and a lead in the movie.

Image:Dusktilldawn.jpg 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. When finally released, the film won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival and practically revolutionised the independent film industry. 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. Pulp Fiction also earned Tarantino and Avery Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and it was also nominated for Best Picture.

After Pulp Fiction he directed episode four of Four Rooms, The Man from Hollywood, a remake of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen. Four Rooms is a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez.

Tarantino's next film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of a novel by his mentor Elmore Leonard. An 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), Japanese film, and Spaghetti Westerns. 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. 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.

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.

On February 24, 2005 it was announced he would direct the season finale of CSI. The two-hour episode, "Grave Danger," was aired on May 19 to stellar ratings and reviews. Although Tarantino is best known for his work behind the camera, he's also made recent appearances on the small screen in the first and third seasons of the TV show Alias.

As of September, 2005, Tarantino has announced his current project is Grind House, which he is co-directing with Robert Rodriguez. He has stated he will "probably" follow that with Inglorious Bastards, but that he needed to spend another year working on the script before filming, making a 2006 release extremely unlikely. 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).

Aesthetics

Tarantino's movies are renowned for their sharp dialogue, splintered chronology, and pop culture obsessions. Often they are viewed as graphically violent, and certainly in his key films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill there are copious amounts of both spattered and flowing blood. However, what affects people most is the casualness, and even macabre humour, of the violence, as well as the tension and grittiness of these scenes.

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. The director is also known for his love of breakfast cereal, and many of his movies feature brands such as Fruit Brute (a spin off of the more popular Franken Berry) in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and Kaboom in Kill Bill.

Influences

Tarantino is widely known as a director who is very much a "film-geek", with an astonishing, encyclopedic knowledge of movies, film criticism, and film history. Particularly, he has a vast knowledge of foreign films, genre films and little-known pieces of cinema. He is a declared lover of exploitation films, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, giallo horror, French New Wave, and British cinema. His love of those genres is mirrored in his works -- all of his films regularly quote other movies and genres in their styles, stories and dialogue. He once summed it up by saying, "I never went to film school; I went to films."

In the 2002 Sight and Sound Directors' poll, Tarantino revealed his top-twelve films of all-time: 1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 2. Rio Bravo, 3. Taxi Driver, 4. His Girl Friday, 5. Rolling Thunder, 6. They All Laughed, 7. The Great Escape, 8. Carrie, 9. Coffy, 10. Dazed and Confused, 11. Five Fingers of Death and 12. Hi Diddle Diddle.

A previous top-ten list of Tarantino's also included Blow Out, One-Eyed Jacks, For a Few Dollars More, Bande a part, the remake of Breathless, Le Doulos, They Live By Night and The Long Goodbye.

Criticism

Tarantino has come under criticism for his use of racial epithets in his films, particularly the word nigger in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, most notably from black American director Spike Lee. In an interview for Variety, Lee said: "I'm not against the word... and I use it, but Quentin is infatuated with the word. What does he want? To be made an honorary black man?"

An oft-cited example is a scene in Pulp Fiction in which a character named Jimmie Dimmick, portrayed by Tarantino himself, rebukes Samuel L. Jackson's character, Jules Winnfield, for using his house as "dead nigger storage", followed by a rant that uses the word profusely. The fact that Jimmie had a black wife was also seen as an insult, specifically by Spike Lee. Lee makes direct reference to this in his film Bamboozled when the character Thomas Dunwitty states: "Please don't get offended by my use of the quote-unquote N word. I got a black wife and three biracial children, so I feel I have a right to use that word. I don't give a damn what Spike says, Tarantino is right. Nigger is just a word."

Tarantino has defended his use of the word by arguing that black audiences have an appreciation of his blaxploitation-influenced films that eludes some of his critics, and, indeed, that Jackie Brown, another oft-cited example, was primarily made for "black audiences:"

To me the film is a black film. It was made for black audiences actually. It was made for everybody, but that was, pretty much, the "main" audience. If I had any of them in mind, I was thinking of that because I was always thinking of watching it in a black theatre. I didn't have audiences ridiculously in mind because I am the audience, but that works well for that too because I go to black theatres. To me it is a black film. [1]

Tarantino has also been criticized for allegedly plagiarizing ideas, scenes, and lines of dialogue from other films. For example, the general plot of Reservoir Dogs seems to be culled from Ringo Lam's City on Fire and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, while the idea of the color-coded criminals is taken from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The Don Siegel version of The Killers played an influence on the opening and ending sequences of Pulp Fiction, and the events of the adrenaline-injection scene closely resemble a story related in Martin Scorsese's documentary American Boy: A Profile of: Steven Prince. Meanwhile, the story of True Romance is practically the same as that of Terrence Malick's Badlands.

Much debate has been sparked on when such references cease to be tributes and become plagiarism. Tarantino, for his part, has always been open and unapologetic about appropriating ideas from films he admires (see Quotes). Tarantino replied to his naysayers with Kill Bill, a two-part homage to some of his favorite films that features such obvious plagiarizing, it practically is excused.

Trivia

• Tarantino once played an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls.
• 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 direct segments of the film) and the upcoming Grind House. It was Tarantino who suggested that Rodriguez name the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy Once Upon a Time in Mexico. 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 - in return, Tarantino directed a scene in Rodriguez's 2005 film Sin City for the same fee.
• Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous actresses, including Sofia Coppola, the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning writer/director of Lost In Translation, Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, and comedienne Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, who he has referred to as his "muse". However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic.
• He has stated that the character of Clarence in True Romance and My Best Friend's Birthday was somewhat autobiographical.
• He is dyslexic.
• Although all of his films feature elements of crime, Tarantino's only brush with "real" crime was an arrest for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch when he was 15 years old. The book is the first Leonard book to feature the characters of Louis and Ordell, whom Tarantino would bring to life with his 1997 film Jackie Brown.
• Tarantino directed an episode of ER called "Motherhood" which aired May 11, 1995.
• Tarantino directed the fifth season finale to the hit show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. 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, the Bride (Uma Thurman) was also captured and buried alive in a coffin. This double-length episode has recently found its way to its own DVD Release on October 10 2005. Tarantino was also nominated for an Emmy for his role in this episode.
• Owns a rare 35mm copy of Manos: The Hands of Fate; he cites it as one of his favorite films.
• Tarantino was one of the few filmmakers pushing for Chinese action filmmaker John Woo to make an American film. When a studio executive once said "I suppose Woo can direct action scenes," Tarantino replied "Sure, and Michelangelo can paint ceilings!"

Trademarks

• Lead characters usually drive General Motors vehicles, particularly Chevrolet and Cadillac.
• He often frames characters with doorways and shows them opening and closing doors. Much of the violence and minor character dialogue is offscreen in his films.
• Briefcases and suitcases play an important role in many of his films.
• Makes references to and features music from cult movies and television.
• The Mexican standoff: All his movies feature a scene in which three or more characters are pointing guns at each other at the same time.
• Often uses an unconventional storytelling device in his films, such as retrospective (Reservoir Dogs), non-linear (Pulp Fiction), or "chapter" format (Kill Bill, Four Rooms). He also guest directed Sin City which also uses a similar layout.
• All of Tarantino's movies are somewhat out of order in terms of chronological time.
• Often casts comedians in small roles: Stephen Wright as the DJ in Reservoir Dogs, Kathy Griffin as an accident witness, Phil LaMarr as Marvin, Julia Sweeney as the junkyard guy's daughter in Pulp Fiction, and Chris Tucker as Beaumont in Jackie Brown.
• Widely imitated quick cuts of character's hands performing actions in extreme closeup, a technique reminiscent of Brian De Palma.
• Long closeup of a person's face while someone else speaks off-screen (closeup of The Bride while Bill talks, of Butch while Marsellus talks).
• Characters in nearly all of his movies have aliases. Honey Bunny and Pumpkin from Pulp Fiction, the heist crew in Reservoir Dogs, and Bill's team in Kill Bill.
• Often plays a small role in his films (Jimmie Dimmick in Pulp Fiction, Mr. Brown in Reservoir Dogs and the answering machine voice in Jackie Brown).
• Often features a character singing along to a song from the soundtrack.
• Makes remarks about Holland in every movie (ringtones, subjects in the dialogues, etc.)
• One of Tarantino's trademarks is the trunk shot — the camera looking out from the trunk of a car at the actors. He has used it in all the films he has directed. The trunk shot was also used in From Dusk Till Dawn, which Tarantino wrote.
• Another trademark of Tarantino is that he uses biracial characters in some of his movies. In Pulp Fiction, Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) mentions a half-black, half-Samoan named Tony Rocky Horror, and in Kill Bill Vol. 1, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) is half-Japanese, half-Chinese American, and her best-friend in the film, Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus), is half-Japanese, half-French.
• Always has an ad for Red Apple cigarettes in his films at some point.
• Always has a scene where a character is followed around by the camera for a fairly long period of time.
• Each of the four films Tarantino has directed and the three movies which he wrote the script for but did not direct have had plots revolving around crime and criminals.
• Cigarette smoking by several main characters is a recurring element of Tarantino's movies, a notable exception being The Bride in the "Kill Bill" series.
• Themes of foot fetishism are prominent in Tarantino's films, especially Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Kill Bill Vol. 2. According to Uma Thurman, Tarantino is known to have a foot fetish.
• Often casts Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Uma Thurman, Michael Madsen, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Filmography

Director

• My Best Friend's Birthday (1987)
• Reservoir Dogs (1992)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• ER (1995) Season 1; Episode 24: "Motherhood" (Director)
• Four Rooms (segment "The Man from Hollywood") (1995)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004)
• Sin City (2005) (Special Guest Director)
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2005) '"Grave Danger: Vols. I & II"
• Grind House ("Death Proof" segment) (2006)
• Inglorious Bastards no official release date announced, possible 2007 release

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)
• It's Pat (1994) (uncredited rewrite)
• Crimson Tide (1995) (uncredited rewrite)
• Four Rooms (segment "The Man from Hollywood") (1995)
• From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
• Curdled (1996) (uncredited Gecko Brothers news report)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004)
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2005) '"Grave Danger: Vols. I & II" (Story credit)
• Hostel (2006) (uncredited rewrite)
• Grind House ("Death Proof" segment) (2006)
• Inglorious Bastards no official release date announced, possible 2007 release

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
• Desperado (1995) Pick-up Guy
• From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Richard Gecko
• Girl 6 (1996) Q.T
• Little Nicky (2000) Deacon
• Alias (TV Series) (2001) McKenas Cole
• BaadAsssss Cinema (2002) (documentary)
• The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005)
• Vzyat Tarantino (2005)

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 (2006)
• Grind House (2006)
• Hell Ride (2006)

Presented By...

In recent years, Tarantino has used his Hollywood power to give smaller and foreign films more attention that they otherwise would not have received. These films are usually given the credit "Presented by Quentin Tarantino." The first of these productions was in 2001 with the Hong Kong martial arts film Iron Monkey which made over $14 million in the United States, seven times its budget, thanks to Tarantino. In 2004 he brought the Chinese martial arts film Hero to U.S. shores. It ended up having a #1 opening at the box office and making $53.5 million. In 2006 the latest "Quentin Tarantino presents" production, Hostel, opened at #1 at the box office with a $20.1 million opening weekend, good for 8th all time in the month of January.

See also

• QT's Diary, a hoax purporting to be Tarantino's blog.

References

• Machiyama, Tomohiro. Tarantino Interview regarding "Kill Bill", Japattack. August 28, 2003. Retrieved December 7, 2005.

External links

• {{{2|{{{name|Quentin Tarantino}}}}}} at the Internet Movie Database
• www.tarantino.info The Quentin Tarantino Archives
• The Independents - Quentin Tarantino Comprehensive site focusing on the films, including scripts, sounds, and more.
• Kill Will - The Rough Magic of Quentin Tarantino essay on QT's film oeuvre
• Bio at Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television
• Blooming Lotus: Redemption and Spiritual Transformation in Kill Bill essay at 24 Lies A Second
• The Anti-Tarantino Page

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