Quentin Tarantino

I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie Zastoupil (née McHugh), a health care executive and nurse, and Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician born in Queens, New York. My father is Italian American and my mother had part Cherokee Native American ancestry. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of 16, I went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. This proved to be influential in my movie-making career. At the age of 22, I landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives, a now defunct video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California where I and fellow movie buffs like Roger Avary spent all day discussing and recommending films to customers.
About my film career:
True Romance was optioned and eventually released in 1993. After I met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged me to write a screenplay.
In January 1992 Reservoir Dogs hit the Sundance Film festival. Reservoir Dogs was a dialogue-driven heist movie that set the tone for my later films. I wrote the script in three and a half weeks and Bender forwarded it to director Monte Hellman. Hellman helped me to secure funding from Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment (which later became Artisan). Harvey Keitel read the script and also contributed to funding, took a co-producer role, and a part in the movie.
The second script that I sold was Natural Born Killers. Director Oliver Stone made a number of changes that I disagreed with. As a result, I disowned the script. Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, I was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black. I instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on my script for Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival. Pulp Fiction earned Roger Avary and me Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. After Pulp Fiction I directed episode four of Four Rooms, "The Man from Hollywood", a tribute to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen. Four Rooms was a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez. The film was very poorly received by critics and audiences. I also starred in and wrote the script for Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, which saw mixed reviews from the critics yet led to two sequels, for which Rodriguez and I would only serve as executive producers.
My third feature film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by Elmore Leonard. An homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre's films of the 1970s. I had then planned to make the war film 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. In 2004, I returned to Cannes where I 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.
I announced in 2005 that his next project would be Grindhouse, which I co-directed with Rodriguez. Released in theaters on April 6, 2007, I contribution to the Grindhouse project was titled Death Proof. It began as a take on 1970s slasher films, but evolved dramatically as the project unfolded. Ticket sales performed significantly below box office analysts' expectations despite mostly positive critic reviews.
Among his current producing credits are the horror flick Hostel (which included numerous references to my own Pulp Fiction), the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot (for which I had once written a script) and Hell Ride (written & directed by Kill Bill star Larry Bishop). I’am credited as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro of Robert Rodriguez's 2005 neo-noir film Sin City. In 2005 I won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards. On August 15, 2007, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presented I with a lifetime achievement award at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.
I have been quoted as saying "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.”