Pop auteur Quentin Tarantino has influenced an entire generation of filmmakers with his ultra-violent, sharply scripted, winking masterworks of cinematic pastiche. Ironically, Tarantino himself is an unabashed imitator, long known to lift plots, scenes, dialogue, and camera set-ups from his favorite films, most of which are genre classics like Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars Trilogy’, blaxploitation films, and Japanese samurai flicks. Though his directorial projects are infrequent (owing largely to his perfectionism and penchant for juggling several projects at once in his over-active imagination), each one has made a major impact on Hollywood and certainly on his blood-crazed nerd-chic devotees.
Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee on March 27, 1963, and is of Italian-American and Cherokee ancestry. When he was eight years old, he moved with his mother and step-father to El Segundo, CA (in the L.A. area) where he attended Hawthorne Christian School. At 14 he wrote his first screenplay, “Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit”. The precocious young screenwriter dropped out of high school at 16, and began acting training at the James Best Theatre Company and later at Allen Garfield’s Actors’ Shelter in Beverly Hills. During this time Tarantino worked at a video store in Manhattan Beach where he met fellow employee Roger Avary – the two would go on to write the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Pulp Fiction” together.
The cinephile twenty-something began concentrating on screenwriting, and eventually saw his script for “True Romance” optioned and produced with Tony Scott at the helm and Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in the leads. It was meeting producer Lawrence Bender at a party, however, that led to Tarantino’s first huge success, his 1992 trend-setter “Reservoir Dogs”. After banging out the script in less than a month, he secured funding for the film with the help of star Harvey Keitel, and the film opened to rave reviews. Most of the film’s lead actors (Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Keitel, and Steve Buscemi) have been frequent collaborators.
His 1994 genre-bender “Pulp Fiction” requires no introduction, as it is now considered one of the most important and influential films of the 1990s. Co-written with Avary, the film received seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director, and Actor (John Travolta), and won the Best Screenplay award for its witty script. Tarantino followed this phenomenal success with the script for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (a film he later disowned due to Stone’s tinkering), a segment of the overwrought omnibus film “Four Rooms”, and a starring turn with George Clooney in Robert Rodriguez’s vampire actioner “From Dusk till Dawn”. His next directorial feature was 1997’s “Jackie Brown”, a subdued Elmore Leonard-based crime film starring Pam Grier and Michael Keaton that celebrated 70s blaxploitation films. Tarantino didn’t make another film until the 2003-04 “Kill Bill” films starring a sensational Uma Thurman.
Tarantino’s latest is “Death Proof”, the first half of the exploitation double feature “Grindhouse”, which also sports “Planet Terror” by Robert Rodriguez. “Death Proof” stars Kurt Russell as a psycho killer who stalks young women in his car. His rumored follow-up is the long-delayed World War II film “Inglorious Bastards”. Undoubtedly, down the road Tarantino will find that everything he touches turns to fanboy gold.