Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor.
Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie Zastoupil, a health care executive and nurse, and Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician born in Queens, New York. Tarantino's father is part Italian and his mother is Irish with part Cherokee Native American ancestry. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of 15, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. This proved to be influential in his movie-making career. At the age of 22, he landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives, a now defunct video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California where he and fellow movie buffs like Roger Avary spent all day discussing and recommending films to customers such as actor Danny Strong.
After Tarantino met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged Tarantino to write a screenplay. In January 1992, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs hit the Sundance Film festival. The film garnered critical acclaim and the director became a legend in the UK and the cult film circuit. Reservoir Dogs was 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. Harvey Keitel read the script and also contributed to funding, took a co-producer role, and a part in the movie. Tarantino's screenplay True Romance was optioned and eventually released in 1993. The second script that Tarantino sold was Natural Born Killers, which was revised by Dave Veloz, Richard Rutowski and director Oliver Stone. Tarantino was given story credit, and wished the film well. 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. Tarantino's third feature film was Jackie Brown (1997). A homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre's films of the 1970s. He had then planned to make the war film provisionally titled Inglorious Bastards, but postponed it 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. Tarantino directed the fifth season finale to the hit show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which first aired May 19, 2005. 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 Vol. 2, the Bride was also captured and buried alive in a coffin.)
Tarantino has been quoted as saying "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'"
Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival. That film earned Tarantino and Roger Avary Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. In 2005 Quentin Tarantino won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards. On August 15, 2007, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presented Tarantino with a lifetime achievement award at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.
Tarantino finished writing Inglourious Basterds, the story of a group of guerilla U.S. soldiers in Nazi occupied France during World War II. Filming began in October 2008 with a projected Summer 2009 release.
Although Tarantino is best known for his work behind the camera, he appeared in his own films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Death Proof as minor characters, and co-starred alongside George Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn. He has also appeared on the small screen in the first and third seasons of the TV show Alias. Tarantino once played an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls. He played cameo roles in Desperado (directed by his friend Robert Rodriguez), and Little Nicky (as a crazy, blind, apocalypse preacher). In 1998, he turned his attention to the Broadway stage, where he starred in a revival of Wait Until Dark. In November 2006, an episode of the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts features Quentin Tarantino interviewing and spending time with singer Fiona Apple. Tarantino appeared briefly in the beginning of Spike Lee's film Girl 6. Tarantino had substantial screen-time in Grindhouse's double-features, Death Proof and Planet Terror, where he respectively takes on the roles of Warren, a bartender, and The Rapist, an infected member of a rogue military unit. He starred as Johnny Destiny in the film Destiny Turns on the Radio. In 2007 he had a small role as Ringo in the Takashi Miike film Sukiyaki Western: Django.
Tarantino worked in a video rental store prior to becoming a filmmaker, paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent, and has cited that experience as inspiration for his directorial career. Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous entertainers, including actress Mira Sorvino, directors Allison Anders and Sofia Coppola, actresses Julie Dreyfus and Shar Jackson and comedians Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, whom he has referred to as his "muse". However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic. He has never married and has no children.
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 directed segments of the film), Sin City and Grindhouse. It was Tarantino who suggested that Rodriguez name the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as a homage to the titles Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon A Time In America by Sergio Leone. 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, and the favor was returned in kind, with Tarantino directing a scene in Rodriguez's 2005 film Sin City for the same fee. Rodriguez was responsible for introducing Tarantino to digital cinematography. Prior to this, Tarantino was a vocal supporter of using traditional film.
Tarantino is a friend of Japanese director Takashi Miike, whom he asked to perform a cameo in Eli Roth's film Hostel. As a favor for Miike doing so, Tarantino appears in the opening action sequence of Miike's movie Sukiyaki Western: Django, released in August 2007.
In a Playboy interview, he talked of smoking cannabis and using ecstasy while filming Kill Bill.
He was thanked in the liner notes of Nirvana's final studio album In Utero although the spelling of his name is incorrect. Tarantino returned the favor by thanking Nirvana on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, along with the message "RIP Kurt".