Best Known As: Film Director,  Film Writer,  Film Actor

Gist:  Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s he was an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and aestheticization of violence. His films include My Best Friend's Birthday (1987), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004), Death Proof (2007) and Inglourious Basterds (2009). His films have earned him Academy, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Palme d'Or Awards and he has been nominated for Emmy and Grammy Awards. In 2007, Total Film named him the 12th greatest director of all-time.

Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds was released at the Cannes Film Festival on 20 May 2009.

Life Facts:  Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie Zastoupil (née McHugh), a health care executive and nurse, and Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician born in Queens, New York. Tarantino's father is part Italian and his mother is of Irish and Cherokee Native American ancestry. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of 15, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. At the age of 22, he landed a job at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives, a now defunct video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California where he and fellow movie buffs like Roger Avary spent all day discussing and recommending films to customers such as actor Danny Strong.

Tarantino finished writing Inglourious Basterds, the story of a group of guerrilla U.S. soldiers in Nazi occupied France during World War II. Filming began in October 2008 with a projected Summer 2009 release.

Before this project, Tarantino had considered making The Vega Brothers. The film would have starred Michael Madsen reprising the role of Vic (Mr. Blonde) from Reservoir Dogs and John Travolta reprising his role of Vincent from Pulp Fiction. Tarantino would eventually re-envision the film to star Madsen and Travolta as the twin brothers of Vic and Vincent Vega, but in 2007, because of the age of the actors and the onscreen deaths of both characters, he claimed that the Vega Brothers project (which he intended to call Double V Vega) is "kind of unlikely now".

Tarantino has expressed interest in filming a much more faithful adaptation of the book Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.

Tarantino divulged information about possible anime prequels to the Kill Bill films. These would probably center around the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, Bill or The Bride before the events of the first two films.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph he mentioned an idea for a form of spaghetti western set in America's Deep South which he calls "a southern."

Tarantino confirmed at the 2008 Provincetown International Film Festival that a full length version of Kill Bill will be released and will hopefully contain an extended "anime" section that detailed the development of Lucy Liu's character.

Tarantino makes references to and features music from cult movies and television. He often features a character singing along to a song from the soundtrack, such as Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) with "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel in Reservoir Dogs and Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) with "Flowers on the Wall" by The Statler Brothers and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) with "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" by Urge Overkill in Pulp Fiction and in Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) with "Across 110th Street" by Bobby Womack.

He will incorporate a scene in which music is heard to fade out completely before fading back in again (known as diegetic music), such as in Reservoir Dogs with the ear scene wherein Mr. Blonde walking to his car, then back inside to "Stuck in the Middle With You".

Tarantino worked in a video rental store prior to becoming a filmmaker, paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent, and has cited that experience as inspiration for his directorial career. Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous entertainers, including actress Mira Sorvino, directors Allison Anders and Sofia Coppola, actresses Julie Dreyfus and Shar Jackson and comedians Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, whom he has referred to as his "muse". However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic. He has never married and has no children. Tarantino recently stated "I'm not saying that I'll never get married or have a kid before I'm 60. But I've made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time to make movies."

One of Tarantino's closest friends is fellow director Robert Rodriguez (the pair often refer to each other as brothers). Their biggest collaborations have been From Dusk Till Dawn (written by Tarantino, directed by Rodriguez), Four Rooms (they both wrote and directed segments of the film), Sin City and Grindhouse. It was Tarantino who suggested that Rodriguez name the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as a homage to the titles Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon A Time In America by Sergio Leone. They are both members of A Band Apart, a production company that also features directors John Woo and Luc Besson. Rodriguez scored Kill Bill: Volume 2 for one dollar, and the favor was returned in kind, with Tarantino directing a scene in Rodriguez's 2005 film Sin City for the same fee.

Tarantino is a friend of Japanese director Takashi Miike, whom he asked to perform a cameo in Eli Roth's film Hostel. As a favor for Miike doing so, Tarantino appears in the opening action sequence of Miike's movie Sukiyaki Western: Django, released in August 2007.

In a Playboy interview, he talked of smoking cannabis and using ecstasy while filming Kill Bill.

He was thanked in the liner notes of Nirvana's final studio album In Utero although the spelling of his name is incorrect. Tarantino returned the favor by thanking Nirvana on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, along with the message "RIP Kurt". It is known that Cobain and his wife Courtney Love turned down an offer to act in Pulp Fiction as Lance & Jody.

Career Facts:  After Tarantino met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged Tarantino to write a screenplay. He directed and co-wrote a movie called "My Best Friend's Birthday" in 1987. The final reel of the film was almost fully destroyed in a lab fire that broke out during editing but its screenplay would go on to be the basis for True Romance.

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Tarantino's screenplay True Romance was optioned and eventually released in 1993. The second script that Tarantino sold was Natural Born Killers, which was revised by Dave Veloz, Richard Rutowski and director Oliver Stone. Tarantino was given story credit, and wished the film well. Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black. He instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction.

After Pulp Fiction he directed episode four of Four Rooms, "The Man from Hollywood", a tribute to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen. Four Rooms was a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez. The film was very poorly received by critics and audiences. He appeared in and wrote the script for Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, which saw mixed reviews from the critics yet led to two sequels, for which Tarantino and Rodriguez would only serve as executive producers.

Tarantino's third feature film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by Elmore Leonard. A homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre's films of the 1970s. He had then planned to make the war film provisionally titled Inglorious Bastards, but postponed it to write and direct Kill Bill (released as two films, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of Wuxia (Chinese martial arts), Jidaigeki (Japanese period cinema), Spaghetti Westerns and Italian horror or giallo. It was based on a character (The Bride) and a plot that he and Kill Bill's lead actress, Uma Thurman, had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction. In 2004, Tarantino returned to Cannes where he served as President of the Jury. Kill Bill was not in competition, Kill Bill Vol. 2 had an evening screening, while it was also shown on the morning of the final day in its original 3-hour-plus version with Quentin himself attending the full screening. Tarantino then went on to be credited as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro of Robert Rodriguez's 2005 neo-noir film Sin City.

The next film project was Grindhouse, which he co-directed with Rodriguez. Released in theaters on April 6, 2007, Tarantino's contribution to the Grindhouse project was titled Death Proof. It began as a take on 1970s slasher films, but evolved dramatically as the project unfolded. Ticket sales were low despite mostly positive reviews.

Among his current producing credits are the horror flick Hostel (which included numerous references to his own Pulp Fiction), the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot (for which Tarantino was credited as an executive producer but with the movie set for release in 2009 he is no longer associated with the project) and Hell Ride (written and directed by Kill Bill star Larry Bishop).

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