Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. His films are characterised by nonlinear storylines, dark humor, aestheticisation of violence, extended scenes of dialogue, ensemble casts, references to popular culture and a wide variety of other films, eclectic soundtracks primarily containing songs and score pieces from the 1960s to the 1980s, alternate history, and features of neo-noir film.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino grew up in Los Angeles. He began his career as an independent filmmaker with the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, a crime thriller film which was funded by money from the sale of his screenplay True Romance (1993). Empire magazine hailed Reservoir Dogs as the “Greatest Independent Film of All Time”.
His second film, Pulp Fiction (1994), a crime comedy, was a major success among critics and audiences. He wrote the screenplay for the horror comedy film From Dusk till Dawn (1996), in which he also starred. Tarantino paid homage to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s with Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch.
In 2003, Tarantino delivered Kill Bill: Volume 1, a stylized ‘revenge flick’ in the cinematic traditions of kung fu films and Japanese martial arts; Volume 2 followed in 2004.
Tarantino next directed the exploitation slasher film Death Proof (2007), part of a double feature with Robert Rodriguez released in the tradition of 1970s grindhouse cinema, under the collective title Grindhouse. His long-postponed Inglourious Basterds (2009) tells an alternate history of Allied Forces in Nazi-occupied France, and was released to favourable reviews; it was followed by Django Unchained (2012), a Spaghetti Western set in the Antebellum South, to further critical favor.
His eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015), was a long-form Western initially screened in a 70 mm roadshow theatrical release. His ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), recounts an alternate history of events surrounding the Tate–LaBianca murders.
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 BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and the Palme d’Or, and has been nominated for an Emmy and five Grammys.
In 2005, he was included in 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.
Style
Tarantino’s films often feature graphic violence, a tendency which has sometimes been criticised. 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 stated that the celebrated animation-action sequence in Kill Bill: Volume 1 was inspired by the use of 2D animated sequences in actor Kamal Haasan’s Tamil film Aalavandhan. He often blends esthetics elements, in tribute to his favourite films and filmmakers. In Kill Bill, he melds comic strip formulas and esthetics within a live action film sequence, in some cases by the literal use of cartoon or anime images.
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 linear 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 prompts the viewer to laugh at scenes that are not funny. However, he insists that his films are dramas, not comedies.
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 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 favourite hero in American history is John Brown. He’s my favourite 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.”
In 2013, a survey of seven 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 United Kingdom, ahead of Christopher Nolan, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.