Exactly 62 years ago, one of Hollywood’s most famous directors was born: Quentin Tarantino, known for acting, screenwriting, and directing films of great worldwide success, such as Pulp Fiction (1996), and Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Read on to learn more about this icon of North American cinema.
Where everything started
Quentin Jerome Tarantino, known only as Quentin Tarantino, was born in Tennessee, on March 27, 1963. He is the son of a relationship between a nurse, who was only 16 years old at the time, and an aspiring actor, who wasn´t very present in his life. When he turned two, his parents divorced, and he moved to Los Angeles with his mother, Connie.
In LA, Connie remarried a musician, who Tarantino considers like his father, and even used his surname until he was 18 years old, when he decided to change his surname to “Tarantino” to help his career. The filmmaker’s mother and stepfather introduced him to the cinema, as they took him constantly. Since then, he hasn´t left TV or cinema.
During school, Tarantino faced many problems, and at 16, he decided to drop out of school. His mother supported him as long as he got a job, so he did. His first job was in a pornographic movie theater, and on the weekends, he studied acting, which he did for 6 years. During that time, he decided that he wouldn´t only be an actor, but mainly a director.
Unlike many successful directors, Tarantino didn’t go to college, and on this, he says, “I didn’t go to film school, I went to films”. Later, he got a job at video archives in California, and it was there that his career would start to take off, getting closer to movies, and becoming practically a self-taught expert in cinema.
At the video rental store, he met Roger Avary, who would become his personal and professional friend. In 1983, Tarantino and Avary directed and wrote the short film Love, Birds, and Bondage, which was eventually discarded, until a friend of Tarantino’s showed him the script of My Best Friend’s Birthday, and he decided to act in the film.
In 1984, at 22 years old, he decided to make his first film, which tells the story of a DJ who decides to throw a party for his friend, abandoned by his girlfriend. However, in the plot, everything goes wrong, and a prostitute ends up falling in love with the DJ. Tarantino worked very hard to raise money to shoot the film, which took 3 years to finish, and when he saw the final result, he was disappointed to feel the film was immature, but at least it had his personality.
Despite this, he wasn’t discouraged. He wrote more, left his job where he worked, and started working as a screenwriter in a small film production company, “CineTel Films”. Even so, his scripts were rejected several times by several production companies, and the times he managed to sell his scripts, he didn´t have enough investors to be able to direct. So he ended up just selling the script, that’s what happened with Natural Born Killers and True Romance.
First well-known movie
During a barbecue, Tarantino told a friend an idea for a script. The friend got interested and asked him to make a draft, which he loved. After trying to offer to several producers, the director Molti Helman offered to be the executive producer and helped to find other investors.
After several attempts, Harvey Keitel, an actor whom Tarantino was a fan, joined not only as an actor in the film but also as a producer. After a lot of work and a course, Reservoir Dogs was ready. In 1992, the movie was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and despite its success, it didn’t get any awards. But this problem was solved soon, in other festivals, like the Cannes Film Festival, one of the most important film festivals in the world.
Tarantino arrived as an independent director and left as a star. Even with the strong and violent scenes, which made some audience members leave the exhibition, the critics received the film well, and after all this, Tarantino’s career took off, receiving several proposals.
The friendship between Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein
“Miramax” was one of the first production companies to believe in his potential, producing several of the director’s films, along with a professional partnership. However, a friendship was also made with one of the owners of “Miramax”, Harvey Weinstein. That friendship ended when The New York Times published a series of allegations of sex crimes that Weinstein committed during his career, becoming one of the biggest sex scandals in Hollywood. Tarantino, for his part, revealed that “I knew enough to do more than I did”, meanwhile Weinstein is in prison and facing new allegations.
First worldwide success
Tarantino only experienced worldwide success in 1994, with his second film, Pulp Fiction. The movie tells violent stories that intertwine with two hitmen, a gangster and his wife, and a boxer. It became classical for its cast, rhythm, and dialogues, besides its iconic scenes, such as the dance scene between the characters “Mia” (Uma Thurman) and “Vincent Vega” (John Travolta), which referenced a Godard film.
The success of both the public and critics made the film win several awards, including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a Palme d’Or. The film was important in many ways, but mainly for helping established actors like John Travolta and Bruce Willis, and new actors like Uma Thurman, to achieve a career refresh.
Cinematography
After the successes of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, came the works Jackie Brown in 1997, Kill Bill – volume 1 in 2003, Kill Bill – volume 2 in 2004, Grindhouse: Death Proof in 2007, Inglourious Basterds in 2009, Django Unchained in 2012, The Hateful Eight in 2015 and, his last work so far, Once upon a time in… Hollywood in 2019.
At the beginning of his career, Tarantino promised himself to make only 10 films. In 2019, his ninth film was released, and it’s now up to us, the viewers, to wait for his next and last film. During his career, there were 290 nominations and 171 wins, including 2 Oscars, the highest American film award. A curiosity is that all the films directed by Tarantino are connected, for example, Vincent Vega, from Pulp Fiction, and Vic Vega, from Reservoir Dogs, are brothers.
Tarantino’s style
As a teenager, he fell in love with a style, which would help him to define his style: exploitation. This style of cinema, which is closely linked to black cinema, represents low-budget and intentionally commercial films with a high and explicit exposure to violence, sex, and drug abuse.
In addition to his parents being more “liberal” with what he watched or not, the suburbs where he grew up were surrounded by Black and Latino culture, including movie theaters, both those that showed Hollywood movies and those that showed exploitation movies. He was also influenced by the French “Nouvelle Vague” movement and the American “Western” movement.
The main personal mark that the director puts in his films is violence with a lot of blood, that aren’t CGI, aggressive and intense dialogues, use of martial arts, such as “Kung Fu”, active use of music, non-linearity of the script and more realistic stories with, sometimes, a positive ending.
Tarantino’s muse
Uma Thurman began working with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction, then starred in the movies Kill Bill – Volume 1 and Kill Bill – Volume 2, becoming a muse of the director. However, their relationship began to decay after a set accident where she ended up losing control of the car, which Tarantino would’ve forced her to drive without a belt.
The actress had back and head injuries, and shortly after, Tarantino said that this accident was one of the biggest regrets of his life. Nowadays, the relationship between the two is better, and even Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, participated in the director’s last film.
Elvis fan
Tarantino has already revealed that he’s an Elvis Presley fan, but he proved to be a fan when he needed to get money to shoot Reservoir Dogs and played “Elvis’s stunt double” in the series Golden Girls.
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The article above was edited by Isabelle Bignardi.
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