Quentin Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter and film producer who has directed ten films. [a] 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 , an 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 $426.1 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 | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1992 | Reservoir Dogs | Yes | Yes | No | Also writer: background radio dialogue | [19] [20] |
1994 | Pulp Fiction | Yes | Yes | No | Story co-written with Roger Avary; Also executive soundtrack producer | [21] |
1997 | Jackie Brown | Yes | Yes | No | Adapted from the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard; Also executive soundtrack producer | [22] |
2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Yes | Yes | No | Also soundtrack producer | [23] [24] |
2004 | Kill Bill: Volume 2 | Yes | Yes | No | [9] [25] | |
2007 | Death Proof | Yes | Yes | Yes | Also cinematographer | [26] [27] |
2009 | Inglourious Basterds | Yes | Yes | No | [28] | |
2012 | Django Unchained | Yes | Yes | No | [25] [29] | |
2015 | The Hateful Eight | Yes | Yes | No | [25] | |
2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Yes | Yes | Yes | [30] [31] | |
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1986 | Love Birds In Bondage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Unfinished short film Also editor and co-directed with Scott Magill | [1] |
1987 | My Best Friend's Birthday | Yes | Yes | Yes | Unfinished feature film Also editor and screenplay co-written with Craig Hamann | [32] |
1995 | The Man from Hollywood | Yes | Yes | Executive | Segment from Four Rooms | [33] |
2005 | The Big Fat Kill | Guest | No | No | Segment from Sin City Directed scene of Dwight driving to the tar pits | [34] |
Year | Title | Writer | Producer | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1991 | Past Midnight | Uncredited | Associate | Rewrite | [35] |
1993 | Iron Monkey | No | Yes | [36] | |
1993 | True Romance | Yes | No | [37] | |
1994 | It's Pat | Uncredited | No | Rewrite | [38] |
1994 | Natural Born Killers | Story | No | Screenplay rewritten by Oliver Stone, David Veloz, and Richard Rutowski | [39] |
1995 | Crimson Tide | Uncredited | No | Rewrite | [26] |
1996 | From Dusk till Dawn | Yes | Executive | Story written by Robert Kurtzman | [40] |
1996 | The Rock | Uncredited | No | Rewrite | [41] |
2007 | Planet Terror | No | Yes | [26] |
Year | Title | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
1993 | Killing Zoe | [42] | |
1996 | Curdled | [43] | |
1998 | God Said Ha! | [26] | |
1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money | Direct-to-video | [26] |
1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter | Direct-to-video | [26] |
2002 | Hero | [44] [45] | |
2004 | My Name Is Modesty | [26] | |
2005 | Hostel | [26] | |
2005 | Daltry Calhoun | [26] | |
2006 | Freedom's Fury | Documentary film | [26] |
2007 | Hostel: Part II | [26] | |
2008 | Hell Ride | [26] | |
Year | Title | Role | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1986 | Love Birds in Bondage | Mickey | Short film | [46] |
1987 | My Best Friend's Birthday | Clarence Poole | [32] | |
1992 | Reservoir Dogs | Mr. Brown | [47] | |
1992 | Eddie Presley | Asylum attendant | Cameo | [19] |
1994 | The Coriolis Effect | Panhandle Slim | Short film, voice cameo | [48] |
1994 | Pulp Fiction | Jimmie Dimmick | [19] | |
1994 | Somebody to Love | Bartender | Cameo | [49] |
1994 | Sleep with Me | Sid | Cameo | [50] |
1995 | Destiny Turns on the Radio | Johnny Destiny | [51] | |
1995 | Desperado | Pick-up guy | [19] | |
1995 | Dance Me to the End of Love | Groom | Short film | [26] |
1995 | Four Rooms | Chester Rush | Segment: "The Man from Hollywood" | [52] |
1996 | From Dusk till Dawn | Richie Gecko | [53] | |
1996 | Girl 6 | Director #1 – NY | Cameo | [54] |
1997 | Jackie Brown | Answering Machine | Uncredited voice cameo | [19] |
1998 | God Said Ha! | Himself | [26] | |
2000 | Little Nicky | Deacon | Cameo | [19] |
2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Crazy 88 member | Uncredited extra | [19] |
2004 | Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession | Himself | Documentary film | [55] |
2005 | The Muppets' Wizard of Oz | Himself | Television film, cameo | [56] |
2007 | Death Proof | Warren the Bartender | [19] | |
2007 | Planet Terror | Rapist #1 / Zombie eating road kill | Cameos | [19] |
2007 | Sukiyaki Western Django | Piringo | [19] | |
2007 | Diary of the Dead | Newsreader | Voice cameo | [57] |
2008 | Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! | Himself | Documentary film | [58] |
2009 | Inglourious Basterds | First scalped Nazi / American GI | Uncredited cameos | [19] |
2011 | POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold | Himself | Documentary film | [59] |
2012 | Django Unchained | Robert (Bag Head #1) / Frankie | Cameos | [19] |
2014 | She's Funny That Way | Himself | Cameo | [60] |
2015 | The Hateful Eight | Narrator | Uncredited voice cameo | [61] |
2018 | What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael | Himself | Documentary film | [62] |
2018 | The Great Buster: A Celebration | Himself | Documentary film | [63] |
2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Red Apple Cigarettes commercial director | Uncredited voice cameo | [64] |
2019 | QT8: The First Eight | Himself (archival footage) | Documentary film | [65] |
2020 | Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth | Himself | Documentary film | [66] [67] |
2021 | Django & Django | Himself | Documentary film | [68] |
2021 | Ennio | Himself | Documentary film | [69] |
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Executive producer | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1995 | ER | Yes | No | No | Episode: "Motherhood" | [70] |
2004 | Jimmy Kimmel Live! | Yes | No | No | Episode: "Season 3, Episode 75" | [71] |
2005 | CSI: Crime Scene Investigation | Yes | Story | No | Episode: "Grave Danger" | [72] |
2014–2016 | From Dusk till Dawn: The Series | No | Based on | No | Based on From Dusk till Dawn , 30 episodes | [73] |
2015–2016 | #15SecondScare | No | No | Yes | 14 episodes | [74] |
2019 | The Hateful Eight: Extended Version | Yes | Yes | No | 4 episodes | [75] |
Year | Title | Role | Notes | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1988 | The Golden Girls | Elvis Presley impersonator | Episode: "Sophia's Wedding: Part 1" | [19] |
1995 | All-American Girl | Desmond Winocki | Episode: "Pulp Sitcom" | [56] |
Saturday Night Live | Himself (host) | Episode: "Quentin Tarantino / The Smashing Pumpkins" | [76] | |
2002, 2004 | Alias | McKenas Cole | Episodes: "The Box (Part 1)", "The Box (Part 2)", "Full Disclosure", and "After Six" | [56] |
2005 | Duck Dodgers | Master Moloch (voice) | Episode: "Master & Disaster" | [77] |
2019 | The Hateful Eight: Extended Version | Narrator (voice) | 4 episodes | [75] |
2022 | Super Pumped | Narrator (voice) | 7 episodes | [78] |
Year | Film | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Budget | Box office [79] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1992 | Reservoir Dogs | 90% (81 reviews) [80] | 81% (24 reviews) [81] | $1.2 million | $2,931,191 |
1994 | Pulp Fiction | 92% (184 reviews) [82] | 95% (27 reviews) [83] | $8.5 million | $213,928,762 |
1997 | Jackie Brown | 87% (95 reviews) [84] | 62% (23 reviews) [85] | $12 million | $39,693,845 |
2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | 85% (236 reviews) [86] | 69% (43 reviews) [87] | $30 million | $180,899,045 |
2004 | Kill Bill: Volume 2 | 84% (246 reviews) [88] | 83% (41 reviews) [89] | $30 million | $154,116,796 |
2007 | Death Proof | 65% (43 reviews) [90] | 77% (36 reviews) [91] | $30 million | $31,126,421 |
2009 | Inglorious Basterds | 89% (333 reviews) [92] | 69% (36 reviews) [93] | $70 million | $321,455,689 |
2012 | Django Unchained | 87% (296 reviews) [94] | 81% (42 reviews) [95] | $100 million | $426,076,293 |
2015 | The Hateful Eight | 74% (333 reviews) [96] | 68% (51 reviews) [97] | $62 million | $161,217,616 |
2019 | Once Upon A Time In Hollywood | 86% (580 reviews) [98] | 84% (62 reviews) [99] | $96 million | $392,105,159 |
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American filmmaker, actor, and author. His films are characterized by stylized violence, extended dialogue often featuring much profanity, and references to popular culture. His work has earned a cult following alongside critical and commercial success; he has been named by some as the single most influential director of his generation and has received numerous awards and nominations, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 American martial arts action 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.
From Dusk till Dawn is a 1996 American western horror film directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Quentin Tarantino from a concept and story by Robert Kurtzman. Starring Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Tarantino, Ernest Liu, and Juliette Lewis, the plot follows a pair of American criminal brothers who take a family as hostages in order to cross into Mexico, but ultimately find themselves trapped in a saloon defending against a horde of vampires.
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 for hunting Jews.
A Band Apart Films LLC was an independent production company founded by Quentin Tarantino, Michael Bodnarchek, and Lawrence Bender that was active from 1991 until its liquidation in 2006. Its name is a play on the French New Wave classic film, Bande à part by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, whose work was highly influential on the work of the company's members.
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
Mélanie Laurent is a French actress and filmmaker. The recipient of two César Awards and a Lumières Award, she is an accomplished actress in the French film industry. Internationally, Laurent is best known for her roles in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Now You See Me (2013), Operation Finale (2018) and 6 Underground (2019).
Denis Ménochet is a French actor. Ménochet is best known to international audiences for his role as Perrier LaPadite, a French dairy farmer interrogated by the Nazis for harboring Jews in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds. In 2023, he won the Goya Award for Best Actor for The Beasts. His performances in Custody, By the Grace of God and Peter von Kant, each saw him receive nominations for the César Award for Best Actor.
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 Antebellum South and Old West, it is a highly stylized, revisionist tribute to spaghetti Westerns. Its title refers particularly to 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.
Django Unchained is the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's motion picture Django Unchained. It was originally released on December 18, 2012. The soundtrack uses a variety of music genres, though with an especially heavy influence from Spaghetti Western soundtracks.
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 only 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.
Gary Kent was an American film director, actor, and stuntman notable for his appearances in various independent and exploitation films. A native of Washington, Kent studied at the University of Washington before later embarking on a film career. He made his feature film debut in Battle Flame (1959) and had roles in several additional low-budget films in the 1960s, including The Black Klansman (1966) and the biker film The Savage Seven (1968). He also served as a stunt double for Bruce Dern in Psych-Out (1969).
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 into development hell.
QT8: The First Eight is a 2019 American documentary film co-produced and directed by Tara Wood. The documentary chronicles the life of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, from his start at Video Archives up to the release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). The film features interviews from the frequent collaborators of his films.
Django & Django is a 2021 Italian documentary film co-written and directed by Luca Rea.