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TRIVIA | PRESS | QUOTES
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Quentin Tarantino (1963 - ) Date of Birth: 27 March 1963 * = television BIOGRAPHY The most important and influential American director of the 1990s, Tarantino is the archetypal film geek, the uberfan whose movies connect directly with an audience who is exactly like him - film-literate fans who have grown up on a steady diet of not only the established and accepted classics but also the trashy, the weird and the provocative. Learning his craft not from a film school but from the racks of video tapes he catalogued at a rental store, Tarantino developed a knack for blending for pop cultural references, hardcore violence and witty, talkative scripts into taut, crowd-pleasing affairs that also attracted much critical praise. And all of this with - by early 2004 - just five films (if we count the two volumes of Kill Bill as discrete productions) actually as director. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he moved to Los Angeles aged just two when his mother Connie McHugh left his father Tony Tarantino and married Curtis Zastoupil. His childhood seems to have been an uneventful one, attending kindergarten at San Gabriel Valley from 1968 before the family moved to El Segundo, South Bay area of L.A. in 1971 when Tarantino switched to the Hawthorne Christian School. Tarantino's love of film developed early, thanks to his mother who took him to the cinema as soon as he was old enough to appreciate it. In 1977, aged just 14, he wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit and two years later walked out of high school to take up a job as an usher at an X-rated movie theatre in Torrance, California. Tarantino first had designs on becoming an actor - he enrolled at the James Best Theatre Company for acting lessons and met fellow would-be actor Craig Hamann with who he would collaborate many times in the coming years. Their first work together was to work on a script, My Best Friends Birthday, which was to become Tarantino's first crack at directing, a 16mm effort that was never completed. In 1984, after working for a while selling exhibition booth space for his new step-father Jan Bohusch, Tarantino landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives where he soon struck up a friendship with fellow worker Roger Avery. While working at the archives, Tarantino continued to study acting (at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills) but switched his attentions mainly to writing. In the space of two years, from 1987 - 1989, Tarantino put together his first scripts; True Romance was the first out of the gate, completed in 1987. He and Avary spent time trying to attract financial backing for the script but with no success, so Tarantino pressed on with another project, Natural Born Killers. He also did his first draft of From Dusk Till Dawn in 1990 while he was working for the production company CineTel, doing uncredited rewrites on the screenplay of Jan Eliasberg's Past Midnight (1992). Natural Born Killers also too proved to be a tough sell but a third script, Reservoir Dogs, the tale of the aftermath of a disastrous diamond heist, proved to easier to put together. Deciding to sell the script to True Romance rather than pursue it as a project for himself (it was finally filmed in 1993 by Tony Scott), Tarantino used the money to finance Dogs as his debut feature. The script was soon generating quite a buzz in Hollywood and actor Harvey Keitel expressed an interest in taking on the lead role, a decision which brought in money from Live Entertainment. In June 1991, Tarantino went to the Sundance Institute in Utah to workshop the script, finally taking his debut feature before the cameras in late Summer. The film was completed in time for the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 where it opened to ecstatic reviews. Even those who accused Tarantino of "borrowing" imagery from Ringo Lam's Long hu feng yun / City on Fire (1987) couldn't fail to appreciate the energy and enthusiasm with which Tarantino made the film. Reservoir Dogs was a massive hit around the world and led to a series of similarly gritty crime thrillers which soon acquired the label "new brutalism", previously a tag applied to the school of architecture represented by the work of Le Corbusier, van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and first used in connection with the Tarantino inspired movies by British journalist Jim Shelley in his 1993 articles Guest Appearance: The Boys are Back in Town (in The Guardian 7 January 1993 p.7) and Down These Mean Streets Many Men Have Gone (in The Times Saturday Review 20 February 1993 p.5). Tarantino, with his infectious enthusiasm for cinema and his motor mouth excitement when engaged on his favourite movies, was soon the darling on 90s film scene, appearing as an actor in other directors' film, producing for his old friends Roger Avery (Killing Zoe (1993)) and becoming every journalist's favourite interviewee. He returned to the director's chair for the outstanding Pulp Fiction (1993) which revitalised the careers of both Bruce Willis and more notably John Travolta, and which went on to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994. It was a stunning success, made for eight million dollars and earning more than 100 million worldwide; critics were fulsome in their praise and it was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (John Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson) and Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman). Inevitably, when someone experiences o much success and such lavish praise so early on, a backlash isn't going to be far away. The first indications of what was to come were seen in the wake of the admittedly hopeless anthology Four Rooms (1995), his first directors gig which failed to excite the critics. Television work followed, including a directing stint on an episode of ER (1994 - ) and a performance in an episode of the short-lived sitcom All-American Girl (1994 - 1995). A proposed gig on The X-Files (1993 - 2002) fell through when Tarantino refused to join the Director's Guild of America. The real backlash began with the release Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) in which Tarantino acted as well as scripting and producing. It was met with a critical hostility he'd hitherto not experienced, possibly due to it being a horror movie released just prior to the late-90s horror revival. He got better notices for his next film as director, Jackie Brown (1997), but the reviews were notably more subdued than the raves he was used to. The next few years saw Tarantino taking a break from his directorial
duties, turning up in a recurring role in the TV hit Alias
(2001 - ) before roaring back to our screens with the magnificent Kill
Bill films. Originally conceived as one huge three hour epic,
the film - which drew freely on Tarantino's love of both Asian exploitation
and Spaghetti Westerns - was released in two "volumes", the
first at the end of 2003 and the second in the Spring of 2004. They
re-established Tarantino as the most inventive and gifted American director
of his generation as he plundered his vast video collection for inspiration,
stirring ideas, images and even music taken from cult classics into
an exhilarating and strangely original piece of work. GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1993 True Romance
(script) 1994 1995 The Anatomy of Horror (performer (himself)) Destiny
Turns on the Radio (performer (Johnny Destiny)) Four Rooms
(executive producer; script, director, performer (Chester) – all
for The Man from Hollywood story) MST3K Little Gold Statue Preview Special (performer (himself in archive footage)) * A
Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
(special thanks) * Saturday Night Live: 11 November 1995 (performer (himself)) * 1996 From
Dusk Till Dawn (executive producer, script, performer (Richard
Gecko)) 1997 1999 Dogma (special thanks) From
Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (executive producer) 2000 Hollywood Goes to Hell (performer (himself)) * Little
Nicky (performer (Deacon)) 2002 Alias: The Box Part 2 (10 February 2002) (performer (McKenas Cole)) * 2003 Kill Bill
Volume 1 (script (as Q), director) 2004 Alias: Full Disclosure (11 January 2004) (performer (voice of McKenas Cole - uncredited)) * Alias: After Six (15 February 2004) (performer (McKenas Cole)) * The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (performer (himself)) Filmland: 19 May 2004 (performer (himself)) * Kill Bill Volume 2 (producer, script (as Q), director, performer (voice of Pei Mei)) Planet of the Pitts (performer (himself)) Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (performer (himself)) * 2005 2005 MTV Movie Awards (performer (himself)) * Blood, Guts and Cleaning Supplies: The Making of The Janitor (performer (himself)) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Grave Danger Part 1 (script, director) * CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Grave Danger Part 2 (script, director) * Duck Dodgers: Master & Disaster / All in the Crime Family (performer (voice of Master Moloch)) * Hostel (executive producer) Make Your Own Damn Movie! (performer (himself)) The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (performer (himself)) * Sin City (special guest director) Sin City: The Premiere (performer (himself)) * 2006 NON-GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1987 My Best Friend's Birthday (producer, script, director, editor, performer (Clarence Pool) - film unfinished) 1988 1990 The Golden Girls: The President's Coming! The President's Coming! Part 2 (12 May 1990) * 1992 Reservoir Dogs (script, director, performer (Mr Brown)) 1993 1994 Killing Zoe (executive producer) Pulp Fiction (script, director, performer (Jimmie
Dimmick)) Sleep with Me (performer (Sid)) Somebody to Love (performer (bartender)) 1995 American Cinema: episode unknown (performer (himself)) * Crimson Tide (dialogue (uncredited)) Desperado (performer (pick-up guy)) ER: Motherhood (director) * 1996 Girl 6 (performer (Q.T.)) Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair (performer (Jack Cavello)) + The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera (performer (himself)) 1997 Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 18 December 1997 (performer (himself)) * Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's (performer (himself - uncredited)) 1998 Jackie Chan: My Story (performer (himself)) Seul contre tous (special thanks) 1999 Forever Hollywood (performer (himself)) * Intimate Portrait: Pam Grier (performer (himself)) * 2001 Chelsea Walls (special thanks) Die Zehn Gebote der Kreativität (performer (himself))
* 2002 Baadasssss Cinema (performer (himself)) The Class of '92 (performer (himself)) Pulp Fiction: The Facts (performer (himself)) Sundance 20 (performer (himself)) 2003 4Pop: Leffamarkkinoinnin pahat pojat (19 October 2003) (performer (himself)) * The 46th Annual Grammy Awards (performer (himself)) * American Idol: The Search for a Superstar: 13 May 2003 (performer (himself - uncredited)) * Double Dare (performer (himself)) Extra: 15 October 2003 (performer (himself)) * Friday Night with Jonathan Ross: 3 October 2003 (performer (himself)) * Jimmy Kimmel Live: 10 October 2003 (performer (himself)) * Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 30 October 2003 (performer (himself)) * Once Upon a Time in Mexico (special thanks) Once Upon a Time: Sergio Leone (performer (himself)) Rove Live: 28 October 2003 (performer (himself)) * Tinseltown.TV: 13 September 2003 (performer (himself)) * The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: 29 September 2003 (performer (himself)) * 2004 Jimmy Kimmel Live: 29 December 2004 (performer (himself)) * Left for Dead (thanks) Pulp Fiction on a Dime: A 10th Anniversary Retrospect (special thanks, performer (himself)) * 2005 Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (special thanks, performer (himself)) * Budd Boetticher: An American Original (performer (himself)) Daltry Calhoun (executive producer) Freedom's Fury (executive producer) Jimmy Kimmel Live: 23 September 2005 (performer (himself)) * Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List: episode unknown (performer (himself)) * Late Show with David Letterman: 11 May 2005 (performer (himself)) * Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 15 May 2005 (performer (himself)) * Magacine: 14 October 2005 (performer (himself)) * Tsunami Aid: A Concert of Hope (performer (himself)) * 2006 Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 3 January 2006 (performer (himself)) * Jimmy Kimmel Live: 9 January 2006 (performer (himself)) * Killshot (executive producer) Last Call with Carson Daly: 13 January 2006 (performer (himself)) * Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 14 January 2006 (performer (himself)) * The Tyra Banks Show: Icons: Tarantino & Twiggy (performer (himself)) * REFERENCES MAGAZINES Time Out no.1757 (21-28 April 2004) pp.14-16 (UK)
Last Updated: 15 October, 2008
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