The future director was born on March 27, 1963. Quentin was the illegitimate child of sixteen-year-old Connie McHugh, who was working as a nurse at the time, and actor and musician Tony Tarantino. From this union he inherited Irish and Cherokee Indian roots from his mother, and Italian roots from his father. The parents soon divorced, since Connie did not have any special feelings for Tony, but got married only to show her feminine independence. Upon learning of her pregnancy, Connie makes no attempt to contact her biological father.
Initially, the mother wanted to give her son the name Quint, in honor of the hero of the cowboy series “Shoot Smoke” Quint Asper, but later she decided to name him Quentin. Remarkably, it was originally a female name, Quentina, which was borne by the heroine of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury.
At the age of two, Connie and her son moved to Los Angeles, where Quentin began attending Fleming Junior High School and took drama classes at the same time. By that time, Connie had remarried Kurt Zastoupal, a local musician, who adopted Quentin and gave him his last name, but the director would later abandon it in order to return the original one, Tarantino, which seemed more suitable to him for his future career as an actor.
Quentin was an avid film fan and spent many hours in front of the TV watching almost everything that was shown there, in particular various series and television shows. At an early age, he watched films such as “Carnal Knowledge”, “Deliverance” and, his favorite, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”, which, by the way, had a rating of +17 and may have reflected in the future on the director and his works.
In Quentin’s eighth year, his mother divorced her husband again. But the child did not lose heart; on the contrary, his interest in cinema invariably grew. Despite his obvious talent in the theatrical craft, he did not achieve similar success in his studies. He did not like studying at a private, fee-paying Christian school at all and, on his mother’s condition that he find a job, at the age of fifteen, Quentin dropped out of school. His first job was as an usher at a movie theater in Torrance that showed pornography. But Tarantino did not get any pleasure from it (although it would seem!).
"Most teenagers think, ‘Cool, I’m in a porn movie theater!" – But I didn’t like porn films. I liked real movies, not this nasty and cheap one.»
To compensate for his lack of experience, Quentin wrote on his resumes that he had worked in Dawn of the Dead and King Lear, which was an obvious lie. In his twenty-second year, he got a job at a video rental store in Manhattan Beach. At this point he met Roger Avery, who would later become a co-screenwriter of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This work allowed him to pay attention to the preferences of visitors and this will help the director’s future experience.
First projects
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At a Hollywood party, Tarantino met Lawrence Bender, the future producer of most of his works, who persuaded him to start writing scripts. The first script was written in 1985 and was called “Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit”, but did not come to fruition. For the next few years, Quentin wandered from studio to studio in attempts to offer them his creativity, but was met with refusal, in particular due to the fact that he demanded his own realization.
In 1987, Tarantino began filming the amateur film My Best Friend’s Birthday as co-writer and director. During the editing process, a fire broke out in the laboratory, destroying most of the film reel. Part of the script for this film formed the basis for the film True Romance.
After all these events, Quentin began work on his next project, Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino wrote the script for the film in three and a half weeks, which he was ready to shoot on a minimal budget, raised from the sale of the script for True Romance. Lawrence Bender sent this script to Monte Hellman, director of Quentin’s favorite western, Escape to Nowhere. Hellman helped Tarantino secure financing from Live Entertainment (which later became Artisan, now known as Lionsgate).
Lawrence Bender was taking acting lessons from Peter Flour at the time. In a conversation with his teacher, he mentioned a new film that he was going to produce. Flur half-jokingly asked who Bender would like to star in.
“If I had to choose from all the actors in the world, then that guy would be Harvey Keitel.”.
By a fortunate coincidence, Peter Floor’s wife knew Harvey. It was decided to give her the script for Reservoir Dogs, which she in turn gave to Keitel. Harvey Keitel, who read the script, took on the role of co-producer and helped with financing, and also played a role in this film.
Before filming began, two-week rehearsals were held in order to save shooting time and film stock. If you watch the film carefully, you will notice that Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink), during a police chase, runs into a green traffic light. Tarantino admonished the actor as follows:
“Okay, you do the following: you take out a gun, you unload it on the cop, you jump into the car and, if the light is green, you speed away.»
In one of her interviews, Connie Zastoval (Tarantino’s mother) said that the phrase Reservoir Dogs arose from a funny situation when Tarantino’s girlfriend called him to watch the film "Goodbye Children", but he refused to say Reservoir Dogs instead of the French Au revoir les enfants.
Quentin Tarantino’s debut in cinema was received extremely positively, noting the well-chosen cast and interesting style of storytelling. But at the same time, the film was criticized for its overly realistic scenes of violence. There were cases that during the show, in particular, in the scene of cutting off the ear of a policeman, people left the cinema hall.
Nevertheless, Tarantino declared himself as a talented director and subsequently only reinforced this opinion with his next film.
Pulp Fiction
Shortly after the release of Reservoir Dogs, Tom Scott’s film True Romance was released, and a year later Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers was released, the release of which was accompanied by a scandal. The scripts for both films were written by Tarantino and subsequently sold to directors. Oliver Stone altered the original script so much that an outraged Tarantino demanded that his name be removed as the author of the script, agreeing to the postscript “Based on the story by Quentin Tarantino.”.
After his big film debut, Quentin began to think about his next project. In the process of writing the script for the future film, he and Lawrence Bender founded the company “A Band Apart”, specializing in filming films and writing musical accompaniment for them. Due to the strength of this company, they were widely used for the filming of Pulp Fiction..