Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American screenwriter, film director and actor. He rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a stylish auteur whose bold use of nonlinear storylines, memorable dialogue, and bloody violence brought new life to familiar American film archetypes. His father was Italian and his mother was of mixed Irish and Native American descent.

Trivia

• One of Tarantino's trademarks is the trunk shot — the camera looking out from the trunk of a car at the actors. He has used it in all the films he has directed.
• A trademark of Tarantino is that he uses biracial characters in some of his movies. In Pulp Fiction, Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) mentions a half-black, half-Samoan named Tony Rocky Horror, and in Kill Bill Vol. 1, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) is half-Japanese, half-Chinese American, and her best-friend in the film, Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus), is half-Japanese, half-French.
• Tarantino once played an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls.
• Always has an ad for Red Apple cigarettes in his films at some point.
• Always has a scene where a character is followed around by the camera for a fairly long period of time.
• Each of the four films Tarantino has directed and the three movies which he wrote the script for but did not direct have had plots revolving around crime and criminals.
• Cigarette smoking by several main characters is a recurring element of Tarantino's movies, a notable exception being The Bride in the "Kill Bill" series.
• One of Tarantino's closest friends is fellow director Robert Rodriguez (the pair often refer to each other as brothers). It was Tarantino who suggested that Rodriguez name the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy Once Upon a Time in Mexico. They are both members of A Band Apart (a reference to the Godard film Bande à part), a production company that also features directors John Woo and Luc Besson. Rodriguez scored for one dollar. In return, Tarantino helped Rodriguez direct a scene in the 2005 film Sin City for the same fee.
• Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous actresses, including Sofia Coppola, the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning writer/director of Lost In Translation, Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, and comedienne Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, who he has referred to as his "muse". However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic.
• He has stated that the character of Clarence in True Romance was somewhat autobiographical. Clarence was also the name of the character he played in My Best Friend's Birthday, an amateur film he also co-wrote and directed in 1987, around the time he was writing True Romance.
• Often casts Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Uma Thurman, Michael Madsen and Samuel L. Jackson.
• He is dyslexic and a high school dropout.
• Tarantino directed the fifth season finale to the hit show . The highly rated episode shared a very similar situation from Tarantino's second Kill Bill film: CSI Nick Stokes is captured and buried alive in a Plexiglas coffin while an Internet camera broadcasts the whole thing to CSI headquarters. In Kill Bill, the Bride (Uma Thurman) was also captured and buried alive in a coffin.
• Owns a rare 35mm copy of ; he cites it as one of his favorite films.
• In the 2002 Sight and Sound Directors' poll, Tarantino voted Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) as the best film of all time.
• Tarantino was one of the few filmmakers pushing for Chinese action filmmaker John Woo to make an American film. When a studio executive once said "I suppose Woo can direct action scenes." Tarantino replied "Sure, and Michelangelo can paint ceilings!"