Life and Career

		Life Story
		Biography

The most important and influential American director of the 1990s, Tarantino is the archetypal film geek, the uberfan whose movies connect directly with an audience who is exactly like him - film-literate fans who have grown up on a steady diet of not only the established and accepted classics but also the trashy, the weird and the provocative. 

Learning his craft not from a film school but from the racks of video tapes he catalogued at a rental store, Tarantino developed a knack for blending for pop cultural references, hardcore violence and witty, talkative scripts into taut, crowd-pleasing affairs that also attracted much critical praise. And all of this with - by early 2004 - just five films [if we count the two volumes of Kill Bill as discrete productions] actually as director.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he moved to Los Angeles aged just two when his mother Connie McHugh left his father Tony Tarantino and married Curtis Zastoupil. His childhood seems to have been an uneventful one, attending kindergarten at San Gabriel Valley from 1968 before the family moved to El Segundo, South Bay area of L.A. in 1971 when Tarantino switched to the Hawthorne Christian School.

Tarantino's love of film developed early, thanks to his mother who took him to the cinema as soon as he was old enough to appreciate it. In 1977, aged just 14, he wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit and two years later walked out of high school to take up a job as an usher at an X-rated movie theatre in Torrance, California.

Tarantino first had designs on becoming an actor - he enrolled at the James Best Theatre Company for acting lessons and met fellow would-be actor Craig Hamann with who he would collaborate many times in the coming years. Their first work together was to work on a script, My Best Friends Birthday, which was to become Tarantino's first crack at directing, a 16mm effort that was never completed.

In 1984, after working for a while selling exhibition booth space for his new step-father Jan Bohusch, Tarantino landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives where he soon struck up a friendship with fellow worker Roger Avery. While working at the archives, Tarantino continued to study acting [at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills] but switched his attentions mainly to writing. In the space of two years, from 1987 - 1989, Tarantino put together his first scripts; True Romance was the first out of the gate, completed in 1987. 

He and Avary spent time trying to attract financial backing for the script but with no success, so Tarantino pressed on with another project, Natural Born Killers. He also did his first draft of From Dusk Till Dawn in 1990 while he was working for the production company CineTel, doing uncredited rewrites on the screenplay of Jan Eliasberg's Past Midnight [1992].

Natural Born Killers also too proved to be a tough sell but a third script, Reservoir Dogs, the tale of the aftermath of a disastrous diamond heist, proved to easier to put together. Deciding to sell the script to True Romance rather than pursue it as a project for himself [it was finally filmed in 1993 by Tony Scott], Tarantino used the money to finance Dogs as his debut feature. The script was soon generating quite a buzz in Hollywood and actor Harvey Keitel expressed an interest in taking on the lead role, a decision which brought in money from Live Entertainment.

In June 1991, Tarantino went to the Sundance Institute in Utah to workshop the script, finally taking his debut feature before the cameras in late Summer. The film was completed in time for the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 where it opened to ecstatic reviews. Even those who accused Tarantino of "borrowing" imagery from Ringo Lam's Long hu feng yun / City on Fire [1987] couldn't fail to appreciate the energy and enthusiasm with which Tarantino made the film.

Reservoir Dogs was a massive hit around the world and led to a series of similarly gritty crime thrillers which soon acquired the label "new brutalism", previously a tag applied to the school of architecture represented by the work of Le Corbusier, van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and first used in connection with the Tarantino inspired movies by British journalist Jim Shelley in his 1993 articles Guest Appearance: The Boys are Back in Town [in The Guardian 7 January 1993 p.7] and Down These Mean Streets Many Men Have Gone [in The Times Saturday Review 20 February 1993 p.5].

Tarantino, with his infectious enthusiasm for cinema and his motor mouth excitement when engaged on his favourite movies, was soon the darling on 90s film scene, appearing as an actor in other directors' film, producing for his old friends Roger Avery [Killing Zoe [1993]] and becoming every journalist's favourite interviewee.

He returned to the director's chair for the outstanding Pulp Fiction [1993] which revitalised the careers of both Bruce Willis and more notably John Travolta, and which went on to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994. It was a stunning success, made for eight million dollars and earning more than 100 million worldwide; critics were fulsome in their praise and it was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor [John Travolta], Best Supporting Actor [Samuel L. Jackson] and Best Supporting Actress [Uma Thurman].

Inevitably, when someone experiences o much success and such lavish praise so early on, a backlash isn't going to be far away. The first indications of what was to come were seen in the wake of the admittedly hopeless anthology Four Rooms [1995], his first directors gig which failed to excite the critics. Television work followed, including a directing stint on an episode of ER [1994 - ] and a performance in an episode of the short-lived sitcom All-American Girl [1994 - 1995]. A proposed gig on The X-Files [1993 - 2002] fell through when Tarantino refused to join the Director's Guild of America.

The real backlash began with the release Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn [1996] in which Tarantino acted as well as scripting and producing. It was met with a critical hostility he'd hitherto not experienced, possibly due to it being a horror movie released just prior to the late-90s horror revival. He got better notices for his next film as director, Jackie Brown [1997], but the reviews were notably more subdued than the raves he was used to.

The next few years saw Tarantino taking a break from his directorial duties, turning up in a recurring role in the TV hit Alias [2001 - ] before roaring back to our screens with the magnificent Kill Bill films. Originally conceived as one huge three hour epic, the film - which drew freely on Tarantino's love of both Asian exploitation and Spaghetti Westerns - was released in two "volumes", the first at the end of 2003 and the second in the Spring of 2004. They re-established Tarantino as the most inventive and gifted American director of his generation as he plundered his vast video collection for inspiration, stirring ideas, images and even music taken from cult classics into an exhilarating and strangely original piece of work. ~ Kevin Lyons

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