Criminals in black suits given colour code-names after a diamond robbery that is never shown; an ear and a straight razor (1992)
Reservoir Dogs — his debut, made for around $1.2 million after a Sundance workshop.
Film · Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino
born 1963 · American
American independent cinema of the 1990s; postmodern pastiche
Quentin Tarantino came out of a California video shop with an encyclopaedic memory for exploitation cinema and rewrote the rules of the American independent film. His work is built from long conversational scenes, sudden extreme violence, scrambled chronology and borrowed soundtracks, and increasingly from revenge fantasies that rewrite history. He has said for years that he will stop at ten features.
How to spot them
- ▸Long digressive dialogue about pop trivia, broken by an explosion of violence
- ▸Chapter headings, scrambled chronology, and a shot from inside a car boot looking up
- ▸No original score: pre-existing records, spaghetti-western cues and 1970s soul
- ▸Feet, a fictional brand of cigarettes, and a director's cameo
- ▸Historical revenge: the villains of history killed on screen the way they were not in life
Key films
A glowing briefcase, a dance contest in a 1950s-themed diner, and three stories told out of sequence (1994)
Pulp Fiction — Palme d'Or and the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
An air hostess plays the ATF against a gun-runner over half a million dollars in a shopping-mall changing room (1997)
Jackie Brown — from Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, and the film that revived Pam Grier's career.
A yellow tracksuit, a sword made by a retired Okinawan master, and a fight with a masked gang in a Tokyo restaurant (2003)
Kill Bill Volume 1 — with Uma Thurman; he counts the two volumes as one film.
A tense card game in a basement tavern, and a cinema fire that kills the Nazi high command (2009)
Inglourious Basterds — Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor as Hans Landa.
A freed slave and a German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter ride to a Mississippi plantation called Candyland (2012)
Django Unchained — his second Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Strangers snowbound together in a Wyoming haberdashery, shot in 70mm Ultra Panavision with a score by Ennio Morricone (2015)
The Hateful Eight — Morricone won his only competitive Oscar for it.
A fading television cowboy and his stunt double meet the Manson family in the Los Angeles of 1969 (2019)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — Brad Pitt won Best Supporting Actor.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on 27 March 1963 and raised in southern California; he left school at fifteen and worked at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach
- •He sold the scripts of True Romance and Natural Born Killers before directing anything
- •Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or in 1994 from a jury presided over by Clint Eastwood
- •His two Academy Awards are both for Best Original Screenplay, for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained; he has three Best Director nominations and no win
- •His editor Sally Menke cut every film up to her death in 2010; Robert Richardson has been his principal cinematographer since Kill Bill
- •Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Christoph Waltz recur across his films, which share a fictional universe with Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burger
- •He wrote the film-criticism book Cinema Speculation (2022) and a novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021), and owns the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles
- •He abandoned his planned tenth film The Movie Critic in 2024
- •He moved to London in January 2026 to write and direct his first stage play, The Popinjay Cavalier, due in the West End in 2027, with his final feature expected afterwards
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- British Film Institute — Where to begin with Quentin Tarantino
- Variety — Tarantino plans to retire after his next film