Tarantino skipped film school, learning cinema behind a video store counter
A high-school dropout who once ushered at an adult cinema spent five years recommending tapes at a Manhattan Beach video shop. Asked about film school, Quentin Tarantino says he went to films instead. His second feature, Pulp Fiction, took the Palme d'Or and a screenwriting Oscar.
Born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino never knew his father, an aspiring actor who left before the birth. He was partly named after Quint Asper, Burt Reynolds's character in Gunsmoke. His mother took him to Los Angeles in 1966 and married the musician Curtis Zastoupil, who escorted the boy to countless screenings, while she let him watch adult fare such as Deliverance. At 14 he wrote a screenplay riffing on Smokey and the Bandit; at 15 he was grounded for stealing an Elmore Leonard novel from Kmart, and that year he left Narbonne High School.
The 1980s were a string of odd jobs, including recruiting for aerospace firms and the long stint at Video Archives, where he met Roger Avary. His first Hollywood gig, in 1986, was as a production assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise tape. A 1988 cameo as an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls paid about $650, and reruns brought roughly $3,000 more, money that helped carry him through preproduction of his debut.
After meeting the producer Lawrence Bender at a barbecue, he wrote a dialogue-heavy heist script in three and a half weeks. Harvey Keitel read it, put money in and took a leading role. Reservoir Dogs premiered at Sundance in January 1992, with Tarantino himself as Mr. Brown. He then turned down studio offers including Speed and retreated to Amsterdam to write Pulp Fiction, which earned seven Oscar nominations and more than $200 million.
His later work ranges from blaxploitation homage in Jackie Brown to the two-part martial arts epic Kill Bill, a rewritten Second World War in Inglourious Basterds and the slave-revenge western Django Unchained, which brought a second screenwriting Oscar. His films have taken more than $1.9 billion worldwide. The ninth, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, became his first novel in 2021, and he has said a tenth film may be his last.
Source: Quentin Tarantino
