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Quentin Tarantino
Segment: Death Proof
Select Director Filmography:
• Sin City (special guest director)
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2
• Jackie Brown
• Pulp Fiction
• Reservoir Dogs
The career of Quentin Tarantino instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend. His improbable story incorporates plot elements previously encountered in earlier "boy wonder" lore (e.g., the youthful adventures of Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg) but, much like this unlikely celebrity's rapid-fire vocal delivery, the pace has been greatly accelerated. By 2003 Tarantino, who also has acted in several features, had helmed only four feature films and one segment of a poorly received omnibus film, which would hardly seem to justify the book-length studies of the filmmaker's work or his considerable influence on a generation of subsequent writers and directors. Of course, winning the Oscar, Golden Globe and numerous critics' awards for Best Original Screenplay for the groundbreaking and much-imitated "Pulp Fiction" (1994) added to his luster. Not bad for a high school dropout who picked up much of his film education while working as a video store clerk.
For better or worse, the entertainment press has selected Tarantino as the symbol of a new generation of young directors of popular films. Hailed by VARIETY as "the video store generation of filmmakers", these would-be auteurs learned what they know about moviemaking and film history by watching tapes on TV and not at film school. A minimum wage job behind a video store counter became a road to a treasure trove of cinematic expression--particularly if one worked, as Tarantino did, at a well-stocked outfit like Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. Cinephiles rather than cineastes, these young buffs tended to have rather catholic if idiosyncratic tastes. One can see influences of everything from arcane Hong Kong action titles to French New Wave classics in Tarantino's work.
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Tarantino and his mother left Knoxville, TN when he was two years old and settled in Los Angeles. After leaving school, he held a succession of odd jobs before finding his niche at Video Archives where, for five years, he regaled customers, including many low-profile industry players, with his passionate opinions and recommendations. There Tarantino first met the film school-trained Roger Avary, his future collaborator on the screenplays for "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), "True Romance" (1993) and "Pulp Fiction" (although the exact nature of their work together remains in dispute).
The pair was hired by producer John Langley, a regular customer who was impressed by the duo's film knowledge, to work as production assistants on a Dolph Lundgren exercise video. This led to work at Cinetel Productions, where they hooked up with producer Lawrence Bender and finished their screenplay for "Dogs". "The Tarantino Story" kicked into high gear with the release of this acclaimed feature debut as writer-director-actor. A brutally violent yet elegantly written crime drama originally budgeted for a mere $35,000, the production grew to $1.5 million when Harvey Keitel became enamored of the script and agreed to star. The result, a cleverly structured and stylized caper with themes of masculinity, loyalty and betrayal, benefited greatly from top notch tough-guy performances from a superior ensemble that also included Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen. It premiered at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and was pointedly snubbed by the jury. Nonetheless, Tarantino was courted by the industry and lionized by some as the next Martin Scorsese, albeit with liberal sprinklings of Samuel Fuller and John Woo.
Tarantino continued in this vein with the screenplay for "True Romance,” a gleefully adolescent daydream fueled by pop culture, violence and testosterone. Slickly directed by Tony Scott, the film offered grandstanding performances and a glossy commercial sheen that rendered the ample violence less distressing than that in "Dogs". "Natural Born Killers", also penned during the same burst of creativity, was helmed with a heavy hand by Oliver Stone, who had the script extensively rewritten, consigning Tarantino to a story credit. Consequently, Stone, quite heavily and publicly criticized by Tarantino, took the kudos and brickbats that the controversial film eventually generated.
Tarantino returned to the director's chair for "Pulp Fiction,” marking a return to a familiar urban landscape characterized by themes of trust, betrayal, and inhabited by gangsters given to low-level postulating. Boasting another A-list cast including Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Uma Thurman and Christopher Walken, the film premiered to acclaim and some controversy at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival where it received the Palme d'Or. It went on to surprising box-office success, grossing over $100 million domestically. "Pulp" made Tarantino the toast of Tinseltown and resuscitated the commercial and critical fortunes of Travolta, whose career management became a well-publicized sideline for the red-hot young filmmaker.
After taking home well over a dozen major awards for "Pulp Fiction", Tarantino was all but omnipresent in late 1994 and 1995. As an actor, he had began popping up in small roles in independent features ("Sleep With Me" and "Somebody to Love", both 1994) but was now being cast in low and medium budget studio pictures. He was the lead in the disastrous comic fantasy "Destiny Turns on the Radio" and did an enjoyable turn as a hapless drug dealer in Robert Rodriguez's "Desperado" (both 1995). Segueing to TV, Tarantino did a guest shot on Margaret Cho's ABC sitcom "All-American Girl" and directed a flashy installment of the hit NBC medical drama "ER" (A few years later, Tarantino was to direct an installment of the popular sci-fi series "The X-Files," but he had refused to join the Directors Guild of America and was unable to secure a waiver to be able to helm the episode).
Tarantino and Bender expanded their production company A Band Apart (taken from "Bande a Part", the original French title of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 classic "Band of Outsiders") to include A Band Apart Commercials and Rolling Thunder. The latter was a specialty distribution label under Miramax Pictures designed to acquire, distribute and market four films per year. The emphasis would be on visceral, exploitation-tinged genre movies. The first acquisition was a quirky Hong Kong import, Wong Kar-Wai's "Chungking Express" (1994, but released in the USA in 1996), an exquisitely stylized romantic comedy in police drama drag.
As a filmmaker, Tarantino returned to the screen to executive produce "Four Rooms" (1995), a poorly received comedy anthology, for which he also wrote, directed and starred in one segment. He fared better as executive producer, scripter and co-star of Rodriguez's "From Dusk Till Dawn" (1996), a moody, violent crime flick transformed halfway through into a gory, special effects-laden vampire movie. The reviews were mixed but box office was brisk. Still in demand as an actor, Tarantino played an unsympathetic version of himself as "QT" in Spike Lee's sex comedy "Girl 6" (1996).
For his long-awaited follow-up feature, Tarantino adapted Elmore Leonard's novel "Rum Punch" and turned it into "Jackie Brown" (1997), a vehicle for actress Pam Grier. Those expecting "Pulp Fiction 2" were disappointed slightly, but the auteur fashioned a textured, satisfying story about a flight attendant (Grier) who conspires with a bail bondsman (Robert Forster) to take down a gun dealer (Samuel L Jackson). While some critics carped over the film's length, most were enthralled with the script and the casting.
Other than a 1998 acting appearance on stage opposite Marissa Tomei in the new Broadway version of "Wait Until Dark" (playing the Harry Roat to mixed-to-poor reviews) and a small role in the Adam Sandler comedy "Little Nicky" (2000), Tarantino took a long hiatus from public appearances and especially from filmmaking--amid tabloid headlines proclaiming rumors of writer's block, pot smoking, temper tantrums and fistfights; rumors he denied--as he searched for the right follow-up project. He spent three years developing a World War II epic called "Inglorious Bastards" but he could never come up with an ending for it. He finally settled on his self-penned script "Kill Bill," an unabashed if violently bloody valentine to the kung fu and blaxploitation films he loved as a youth, after encountering his "Pulp Fiction" player Uma Thurman at a 2000 Oscar bash who recalled an idea the two cooked up on the set of their earlier collaboration. The story centered on a bride who is left for dead after her wedding party is slaughtered at the chapel. The woman swears vengeance on the attackers and hunts them down one by one. Tarantino gave Thurman 30 pages of script for her 30th birthday, and the film, a meditation on vengeance described by the auteur as "the movie of my geek movie dreams," was soon a go.
Although initially set as a $42 million movie, "Kill Bill" ballooned into a $60-plus million, three hour opus that took 155 days to shoot--some insiders believed this was the writer-director's movie meltdown, equivalent to Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," but Tarantino kept forging forward until the film was finished. Miramax, the studio behind "Kill Bill," was impressed with the quality of the footage yet unsure of an audience's ability to endure such levels of relentless violence. In a shrewd movie both financially and hype-wise, the studio decided to issue the film in two parts just months away from each other as "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (2003) and "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" (2004)—although studio head Harvey Weinstein did have to haggle with Tarantino and Lawrence Bender to give up some of their compensation in order to provide for increased marketing costs and star salaries (rather than budget overages), at least until the studio saw a profit returned. One of the most graphically violent films ever released—with an R rating, no less—"Kill Bill, Vol. 1" proved to be every bit as critically polarizing as each previous Tarantino effort, with many critics calling it brilliant cinema and others decrying its gut-wrenching scenes. And like many other Tarantino efforts, "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" spun the already established formula on its head when it scaled down the action in favor of unexpected character moments and the writer-directer's characteristically absorbing dialogue--not to mention demonstrating his gift for luring top-notch performances out of actors whose careers have dimmed (David Carradine, in this case).
Tarantino next appeared as a "special guest director" in director Robert Rodriguez and writer-artist Frank Miller's adaptation of Miller's crime noir comic book series "Sin City" (2005), with Tarantino helming the tense, eerie sequence within "The Big Fat Kill" storyline in which the tough but noble Dwight (Clive Owen) has an extended conversation with the corpse of the corrupt cop Jackie Boy (Benicio del Toro) as he drives to dispose of the dead bodies to the tar pits in hopes of avoiding a turf war. Continuing to demonstrate his love of a wide-ranging array of pop culture icons, Tarantino stepped behind the camera to direct the 2005 season finale of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," which featured the final TV performance of Frankl Gorshin and, like "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," a plot centering around a cast member being buried alive. After scoring an Emmy nomination his CSI stint, Tarantino expressed interest in assembling a limited-run series for which he'd write and direct all 12 episodes, "like one big arc/novel." As a performer, he next cameoed as himself in the enchanting ABC telepic "The Muppets' 'Wizard of Oz'" (2005) and made three guest appearances as former SD-6 agent-turned-international criminal McKenas Cole on one of his favorite TV shows, "Alias" (ABC, 2001-06).
A great interview subject, Tarantino has quickly cultivated an intriguing public persona. He enjoys dual status as the "film geek who made good" and the reigning avatar of postmodern "cool". The latter quality is conveyed by the playful hipster tone of his protagonists, their retro clothing, a mastery of pop culture allusions and killer soundtracks. Eventually, the mere fact that Tarantino liked a particular film or performer became a marketable selling point. Tarantino also showed his canny mastery of self-promotion, reviving his fading image as the poster boy for bad boy cinema--he was famously sued by producer Don Murphy for $5,000,000, accused of assault after Tarantino attacked Murphy in restaurant, slammed him against the wall and punched him in 1997—when he appeared apparently tipsy on Jay Leno's "The Tonight Show" while promoting "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" in 2003. Tarantino next added his name to Eli Roth’s second feature, “Hostel” (2006), a brutal horror flick about two American college buddies (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) lured to an out-of-the-way hostel in a Slovakian town rumored to house desperate, but beautiful Eastern European women. Following their wrong heads, both Americans get trapped in a truly sinister situation that plunges them into the dark recesses of human nature.
Quoteables...
"When I was on "The View" (1997), Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back,'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.'"
"If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it."
(On making another "Kill Bill" movie) "Oh yeah, initially I was thinking this would be my "Dollars Trilogy". I was going to do a new one every ten years. But I need at least fifteen years before I do this again. I've already got the whole mythology: Sofie Fatale will get all of Bill's money. She'll raise Nikki, who'll take on The Bride. Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as The Bride deserved hers. I might even shoot a couple of scenes for it now so I can get the actresses while they're this age."
On collecting movies: "If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of."
"Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it."
"When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'"
"If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something."
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