Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino

27 March 1963

An American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. Tarantino grew up an obsessed film fan and worked in a video rental store while training to act. His career began in the late 1980s. 

His films are characterized by non-linear storylines, satirical subject matter, and an aestheticization of violence, as well as features of neo-noir film and spaghetti Westerns. 

Tarantino has received many industry awards, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards and the Palme d'Or, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy.

As director, writer, producer, actor

• My Best Friend's Birthday (1987)
• Past Midnight (1991)
• Reservoir Dogs (1992)
• True Romance (1993)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Natural Born Killers (1994)
• It's Pat (1994)
• Somebody to Love (1994)
• Sleep with Me (1994)
• Killing Zoe (1994)
• Four Rooms (1995)
• Desperado (1995)
• Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995)
• Crimson Tide (1995)
• The Rock (1996)
• Girl 6 (1996)
• From Dusk till Dawn (1996)
• Curdled (1996)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• From Dusk Till Dawn 2 (1999)
• From Dusk Till Dawn 3 (1999)
• Little Nicky (2000)
• Kill Bill Volume I (2003)
• Kill Bill Volume II (2004)
• My Name Is Modesty (2004)
• Sin City (2005)
• Daltry Calhoun (2005)
• Hostel (2005)
• Freedom's Fury (2006)
• Grindhouse (2007)
• Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)
• Hostel: Part II (2007)
• Hell Ride (2008)
• Inglourious Basterds (2009)
• Machete (2010)
• The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)
• Django Unchained (2012)
• She's Funny That Way (2015)
• The Hateful Eight (2015)

Quotations

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When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

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To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

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I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

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I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on.

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If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

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Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

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I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

* * *

The good ideas will survive.

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Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

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If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

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A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

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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.

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I steal from every movie ever made.

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I couldn't spell anything. I couldn't remember anything, but I could go to a movie and I knew who starred in it, who directed it, everything.

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I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

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I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

* * *

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. I'll be the crazy old movie guy.

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I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

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Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.

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Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

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I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.

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I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

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I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

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As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I'm severed.

* * *

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.

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I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

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I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

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It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.

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To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

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I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

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Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

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Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

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Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.

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All my movies are achingly personal.

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It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back.

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L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

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I always do an all-night horror marathon on Saturdays where we start at seven and go until five in the morning.

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I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

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I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

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I'm a historian in my own mind.

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When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

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If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do.

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If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

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My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

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