Quentin Tarantino

Tony Tarantino left before his son was born, and Connie McHugh raised the boy alone in Knoxville until she moved them both to Los Angeles in 1966. She let him watch films no child should have been in the room for. At 15 he dropped out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City. He ushered at an adult movie theater in Torrance after lying about his age, recruited for aerospace firms, and then spent five years behind the counter at Video Archives, a rental store in Manhattan Beach. He watched everything on the shelves and argued about all of it with whoever came in. Asked later whether he had gone to film school, he said no, he went to films.

Reservoir Dogs reached Sundance in January 1992 and Pulp Fiction took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 1994. It grossed more than 200 million dollars and won him a screenplay Oscar shared with Roger Avary. What changed was not the blood. It was that a mainstream commercial hit ran its three stories out of order and let its characters digress at length about hamburgers and foot massages. A decade of imitators copied the surface. Jackie Brown came in 1997, then the two Kill Bill volumes, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Three charges follow him. That the violence is stylised to the point of weightlessness, so nothing on screen can hurt. That his use of racial slurs is indulgence: Spike Lee has pressed this since 1997, saying Tarantino is infatuated with the word, and refused to see Django Unchained, calling it disrespectful to his ancestors. Tarantino says the language is historically accurate and he will not sanitise it. And the Kill Bill crash: Uma Thurman said in 2018 that he pressed her into driving a car she did not want to drive, and the wreck permanently injured her neck and knees. He called it the biggest regret of his life and said he apologised. He was also the director closest to Harvey Weinstein's Miramax, and said in 2017 he had known enough to do more, and was ashamed he had not.

He has said for years that he will stop at 10 films, on the theory that most directors end badly and that the only way to avoid it is to quit while the work holds. Nine are made. Both his Academy Awards are for original screenplay, in 1995 and 2013, and none is for directing. Since 2020 he has published a novel and Cinema Speculation, a 2022 book of criticism about the New Hollywood pictures he grew up on, and he hosts a podcast named for the video store. He is 63 and still working, which is the plain reason the verdict on him is not settled.

Quentin Tarantino's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Reservoir Dogs film
  Written in three and a half weeks. Harvey Keitel read the script and helped fund it 1992
• Pulp Fiction film
  Palme d'Or at Cannes and the original screenplay Oscar 1994
• Jackie Brown film
  From Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch — Leonard called it his favourite adaptation 1997
• Kill Bill film
  Released in two volumes, 2003 and 2004, which he counts as one film 2003
• Django Unchained film
  His second original screenplay Oscar, and the film Spike Lee refused to see 2012
• Cinema Speculation book
  Criticism of the New Hollywood films he watched as a child 2022

• March 27, 1963 aged 0 Born in Knoxville, Tennessee His father, an aspiring actor, had already left the family.
• 1966 aged ~3 His mother brings him back to Los Angeles The family settled in Torrance.
• November 19, 1988 aged 25 Plays an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls Reruns paid him roughly 3,000 dollars in residuals, which helped fund preproduction on Reservoir Dogs.
• January 1992 aged 28 Reservoir Dogs screens at Sundance Harvey Keitel had read the script and put money into it.
• May 23, 1994 aged 31 Pulp Fiction takes the Palme d'Or at Cannes
• March 27, 1995 aged 32 Wins the original screenplay Oscar on his 32nd birthday Shared with Roger Avary. He was also nominated for directing and lost.
• 2003 aged ~40 Uma Thurman crashes a car on the Kill Bill set She made the episode public in the New York Times 15 years later.
• October 18, 2017 aged 54 Says he knew enough about Harvey Weinstein to have done more What I did was marginalize the incidents, he told the New York Times.
• November 1, 2022 aged 59 Publishes Cinema Speculation A second career as a film critic and historian.

• Harvey Weinstein b. 1952
  Film producer convicted of sex crimes in New York and California produced by
• Spike Lee b. 1957
  Four decades of American films about race that refuse to end in reconciliation. criticised by
• Samuel L. Jackson b. 1948
  Highest-grossing actor of all time whose prolific career spans blockbusters and indie films. cast repeatedly
• Robert Altman 1925–2006
  Made overlapping dialogue, drifting cameras and enormous casts into an American film language, lost Hollywood for a decade, and came back at 67. influenced by
• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. influenced by