Quentin Tarantino is an American filmmaker who has directed ten films. [lower-alpha 1] He first began his career in the 1980s by directing and writing Love Birds In Bondage [1] and writing, directing and starring in the black-and-white My Best Friend's Birthday , a partially lost amateur short film which was never officially released. He impersonated musician Elvis Presley in a small role in the sitcom The Golden Girls (1988), and briefly appeared in Eddie Presley (1992). As an independent filmmaker, he directed, wrote, and appeared in the violent crime thriller Reservoir Dogs (1992), which tells the story of six strangers brought together for a jewelry heist. Proving to be Tarantino's breakthrough film, it was named the greatest independent film of all time by Empire . [2] [3] Tarantino's screenplay for Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) was nominated for a Saturn Award. [4] Also in 1993, he served as an executive producer for Killing Zoe and wrote two other films.
In 1994, Tarantino wrote and directed the neo-noir black comedy Pulp Fiction , a major critical and commercial success. Cited in the media as a defining film of modern Hollywood, the film earned Tarantino an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Best Director nomination. [5] The following year, Tarantino directed The Man from Hollywood, one of the four segments of the anthology film Four Rooms , and an episode of ER , entitled "Motherhood". He wrote Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk till Dawn (1996)—one of the many collaborations between them—which attained cult status and spawned several sequels, [6] in which they served as executive producers. Tarantino's next directorial ventures Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill (2003–2004) were met with critical acclaim. [7] [8] The latter, a two-part martial arts film (Volume 1 and Volume 2), follows a former assassin seeking revenge on her ex-colleagues who attempted to kill her. [9]
Tarantino's direction of "Grave Danger", a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode, garnered him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series nomination. [10] He directed a scene in Frank Miller and Rodriguez's Sin City (2005). Tarantino and Rodriguez later collaborated in the double feature Grindhouse (2007); Tarantino directed the segment Death Proof . He next penned and directed the war film Inglourious Basterds (2009), a fictionalized account of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. The critically and commercially successful film earned Tarantino two nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards—Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. [11] [12] His greatest commercial success came with the 2012 Western film Django Unchained , which is about a slave revolt in the Antebellum South. Earning $425.4 million worldwide, it won him another Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. [13] [14] Tarantino then wrote and directed another commercially successful Western film, The Hateful Eight (2015), [15] whose screenplay was nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award. [16] [17] He wrote the 2019 drama Once Upon A Time In Hollywood , which follows a fading actor and his stunt double as they navigate 1969 Hollywood. The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. [18]
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1992 | Reservoir Dogs | Yes | Yes | No | [19] [20] | |
1994 | Pulp Fiction | Yes | Yes | No | Story co-written with Roger Avary | [21] |
1997 | Jackie Brown | Yes | Yes | No | [22] | |
2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Yes | Yes | No | Tarantino considers Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2 (2004) to be a single film. | [23] [24] |
2004 | Kill Bill: Volume 2 | Yes | Yes | No | [9] | |
2007 | Grindhouse : Death Proof | Yes | Yes | Yes | Also cinematographer | [25] [26] |
2009 | Inglourious Basterds | Yes | Yes | No | [27] | |
2012 | Django Unchained | Yes | Yes | No | [24] [28] | |
2015 | The Hateful Eight | Yes | Yes | No | [24] | |
2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Yes | Yes | Yes | [29] [30] | |
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1995 | Four Rooms | Segment director | Segment writer | Executive | Segment: "The Man from Hollywood" | [31] |
2005 | Sin City | Guest director | No | No | [32] | |
Year | Title | Writer | Producer | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1991 | Past Midnight | Uncredited | Associate | [33] |
1993 | True Romance | Yes | No | [34] |
1994 | Natural Born Killers | Story | No | [35] |
1994 | It's Pat | Uncredited | No | [36] |
1995 | Crimson Tide | Uncredited | No | [25] |
1996 | From Dusk till Dawn | Yes | Executive | [37] |
1996 | The Rock | Uncredited | No | [38] |
2007 | Grindhouse : Planet Terror | No | Yes | [25] |
Year | Title | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|
1993 | Killing Zoe | [39] | |
1996 | Curdled | [40] | |
1998 | God Said Ha! | [25] | |
1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money | Direct-to-video | [25] |
1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter | Direct-to-video | [25] |
2002 | Hero | [41] [42] | |
2004 | My Name Is Modesty | [25] | |
2005 | Daltry Calhoun | [25] | |
2005 | Hostel | [25] | |
2006 | Freedom's Fury | Documentary film | [25] |
2007 | Hostel: Part II | [25] | |
2008 | Hell Ride | [25] | |
Year | Title | Role | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1987 | My Best Friend's Birthday | Clarence Poole | Lead role | [43] |
1992 | Eddie Presley | Asylum attendant | Cameo | [19] |
1992 | Reservoir Dogs | Mr. Brown | [44] | |
1994 | The Coriolis Effect | Panhandle Slim | Short film, voice cameo | [45] |
1994 | Pulp Fiction | Jimmie Dimmick | [19] | |
1994 | Somebody to Love | Bartender | Cameo | [46] |
1994 | Sleep with Me | Sid | Cameo | [47] |
1995 | Dance Me to the End of Love | Groom | Short film | [25] |
1995 | Four Rooms | Chester Rush | Segment: "The Man from Hollywood" | [48] |
1995 | Desperado | Pick-up guy | [19] | |
1995 | Destiny Turns on the Radio | Johnny Destiny | [49] | |
1996 | From Dusk till Dawn | Richie Gecko | [50] | |
1996 | Girl 6 | Director #1 – NY | Cameo | [51] |
1997 | Jackie Brown | Answering Machine | Voice cameo | [19] |
1998 | God Said Ha! | Himself | [25] | |
2000 | Little Nicky | Deacon | Cameo | [19] |
2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Crazy 88 member | Cameo | [19] |
2005 | The Muppets' Wizard of Oz | Himself | Television film, cameo | [52] |
2007 | Death Proof | Warren the Bartender | [19] | |
2007 | Sukiyaki Western Django | Piringo | [19] | |
2007 | Planet Terror | Rapist #1 / Zombie eating road kill | Cameos | [19] |
2007 | Diary of the Dead | Newsreader | Voice cameo | [53] |
2008 | Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! | Himself | Documentary film | [54] |
2009 | Inglourious Basterds | First scalped Nazi / American GI | Cameo | [19] |
2011 | POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold | Himself | Documentary film | [55] |
2012 | Django Unchained | Robert (Bag Head #1) / Frankie | Cameos | [19] |
2014 | She's Funny That Way | Himself | Cameo | [56] |
2015 | The Hateful Eight | Narrator | Voice cameo | [57] |
2018 | What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael | Himself | Documentary film | [58] |
2018 | The Great Buster: A Celebration | Himself | Documentary film | |
2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Red Apple Cigarettes commercial director | Voice cameo | [59] |
2019 | QT8: The First Eight | Himself (archival footage) | Documentary film | [60] |
2020 | Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth | Himself | Documentary film | [61] [62] |
2021 | Django & Django | Himself | Documentary film | [63] |
2021 | Ennio | Himself | Documentary film |
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1995 | ER | Yes | No | Episode: "Motherhood" | [64] |
2005 | CSI: Crime Scene Investigation | Yes | Story | Episode: "Grave Danger" | [65] |
2014–2016 | From Dusk till Dawn: The Series | No | Story | Based on From Dusk till Dawn , story co-written with Robert Rodriguez | [66] |
Year | Title | Role | Notes | Refs. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1988 | The Golden Girls | Elvis Presley impersonator | Episode: "Sophia's Wedding: Part 1" | [19] |
1995 | All-American Girl | Desmond Winocki | Episode: "Pulp Sitcom" | [52] |
Saturday Night Live | Himself (host) | Episode: "Quentin Tarantino / The Smashing Pumpkins" | [67] | |
2002, 2004 | Alias | McKenas Cole | Episodes: "The Box (Part 1)", "The Box (Part 2)", "Full Disclosure", and "After Six" | [52] |
2005 | Duck Dodgers | Master Moloch (voice) | Episode: "Master & Disaster" | [68] |
2022 | Super Pumped | Narrator (voice) | 7 episodes | [69] |
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. His films are characterized by stylized violence, extended dialogue including a pervasive use of profanity, and references to popular culture.
A cameo appearance, also called a cameo role and often shortened to just cameo, is a brief guest appearance of a well-known person or character in a work of the performing arts. These roles are generally small, many of them non-speaking ones, and are commonly either appearances in a work in which they hold some special significance or renowned people making uncredited appearances. Short appearances by celebrities, film directors, politicians, athletes or musicians are common. A crew member of the movie or show playing a minor role can be referred to as a cameo role as well, such as director Alfred Hitchcock who made frequent cameo appearances in his films.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is an American actress. She began her career on television during the 1970s before making her film breakthrough in the teen film Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). She received critical praise for her performances in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Miami Blues (1990), Backdraft (1991), Single White Female (1992), and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).
Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 American neo-noir crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in his feature-length debut. It stars Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Tarantino, and Edward Bunker as diamond thieves whose heist of a jewelry store goes terribly wrong. Kirk Baltz, Randy Brooks, and Steven Wright also play supporting roles. The film incorporates many motifs that have become Tarantino's hallmarks: violent crime, pop culture references, profanity, and nonlinear storytelling.
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 American martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, who swears revenge on a group of assassins and their leader, Bill, after they try to kill her and her unborn child. Her journey takes her to Tokyo, where she battles the yakuza.
Jackie Brown is a 1997 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on the 1992 novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. It stars Pam Grier as Jackie Brown, a flight attendant who smuggles money between the United States and Mexico. Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, and Robert De Niro appear in supporting roles.
Four Rooms is a 1995 American anthology farce black comedy film co-written and co-directed by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. The story is set in the fictional Hotel Mon Signor in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve. Tim Roth plays Ted, the bellhop and main character in the frame story, whose first night on the job consists of four very different encounters with various hotel guests.
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger and Mélanie Laurent. The film tells an alternate history story of two converging plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership at a Paris cinema—one through a British operation largely carried out by a team of Jewish American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), and another by French Jewish cinema proprietor Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) who seeks to avenge her murdered family. Both are faced against Hans Landa (Waltz), an SS colonel with a fearsome reputation of hunting Jews. The title was inspired by Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Euro War film The Inglorious Bastards, though Tarantino's film is not a remake of it.
Michael Madsen is an American actor. Alongside his frequent collaborations with Quentin Tarantino—Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)—he is known for his appearances in films such as The Natural (1984), The Doors (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), Free Willy (1993), Species (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), Die Another Day (2002), Sin City (2005), and Scary Movie 4 (2006). He has played voice roles in various video games, including Grand Theft Auto III (2001), Narc (2005), the Dishonored series (2012–2017), and Crime Boss: Rockay City (2023). Madsen has five children, including actor Christian Madsen.
The Legend of Zorro is a 2005 American Western swashbuckler film directed by Martin Campbell, produced by Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Lloyd Phillips, with music by James Horner, and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. It is the sequel to 1998's The Mask of Zorro; Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones reprise their roles as the titular hero and his spouse, Elena, and Rufus Sewell stars as the villain, Count Armand. The film takes place in San Mateo County, California and was shot in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, with second-unit photography in Wellington, New Zealand. The film was theatrically released on October 28, 2005, by Columbia Pictures, and earned $142.4 million on a $65 million budget.
Allen Garfield was an American film and television actor.
Hyperlink cinema is a style of filmmaking characterized by complex or multilinear narrative structures with multiple characters under one unifying theme.
Django Unchained is a 2012 American revisionist Western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson, with Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Michael Parks, and Don Johnson in supporting roles. Set in the Old West and Antebellum South, it is a highly stylized, heavily revisionist tribute to spaghetti Westerns, in particular the 1966 Italian film Django by Sergio Corbucci. The story follows a slave who trains under a German bounty hunter with the ultimate goal of reuniting with his wife.
Leonardo DiCaprio is an American actor who began his career performing as a child on television. He appeared on the shows The New Lassie (1989) and Santa Barbara (1990) and also had long running roles in the comedy-drama Parenthood (1990) and the sitcom Growing Pains (1991). DiCaprio played Tobias "Toby" Wolff opposite Robert De Niro in the biographical coming-of-age drama This Boy's Life in 1993. In the same year, he had a supporting role as a developmentally disabled boy Arnie Grape in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. In 1995, DiCaprio played the leading roles of an American author Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. The following year he played Romeo Montague in the Baz Luhrmann-directed film Romeo + Juliet (1996). DiCaprio starred with Kate Winslet in the James Cameron-directed film Titanic (1997). The film became the highest grossing at the worldwide box-office, and made him famous globally. For his performance as Jack Dawson, he received the MTV Movie Award for Best Male Performance and his first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama.
The Hateful Eight is a 2015 American Western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern, as eight dubious strangers who seek refuge from a blizzard in a stagecoach stopover some time after the American Civil War.
The Hateful Eight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (stylized as Quentin Tarantino's The H8ful Eight) is the soundtrack album to Quentin Tarantino's 2015 motion picture The Hateful Eight. The soundtrack includes the first complete original score for a Tarantino film and is composed, orchestrated and conducted by Ennio Morricone. Morricone composed 50 minutes of original music for The Hateful Eight.
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is a 2019 comedy-drama film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Produced by Columbia Pictures, Bona Film Group, Heyday Films, and Visiona Romantica and distributed by Sony Pictures, it is a co-production between the United States, United Kingdom, and China. It features a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie. Set in 1969 Los Angeles, the film follows a fading actor and his stunt double as they navigate the rapidly changing film industry, with the looming threat of the Tate murders hanging overhead. It features "multiple storylines in a modern fairy tale tribute to the final moments of Hollywood's golden age."
The following is a list of unproduced Quentin Tarantino projects in roughly chronological order. During his career, American film director Quentin Tarantino has worked on a number of projects which never progressed beyond the pre-production stage under his direction. Some of these projects were officially cancelled and scrapped or fell in development hell.