Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor whose three-decade career has produced one of the most-distinctive American filmmaker bodies of work in late-20th and early-21st-century cinema — characterized by his non-linear narrative structures, extensive pop-culture references, distinctive dialogue, and graphic stylized violence. He was born Quentin Jerome Tarantino on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He moved with his mother to Los Angeles in 1968 at age four and grew up in the South Bay area south of Los Angeles.

His pre-filmmaking career was unusually shaped by his late-1980s job at the Video Archives video-rental store in Manhattan Beach, California. The five-year Video Archives period — during which he watched thousands of films across every genre — shaped the encyclopedic film knowledge that became central to his subsequent filmmaking. He sold his first screenplay True Romance in 1987 (Tony Scott directed the 1993 film) and his second Natural Born Killers in 1990 (Oliver Stone directed the 1994 film).

His directorial debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) — a heist-gone-wrong drama set in Los Angeles — debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 and made Tarantino one of the most-iconic American indie-film directors of the early 1990s. His 1994 follow-up Pulp Fiction — featuring the non-linear narrative structure and the Samuel L. Jackson Ezekiel monologue — won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the 1995 Best Original Screenplay Academy Award.

His subsequent films have included Jackie Brown (1997), the Kill Bill two-part film (2003, 2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009, his second Best Original Screenplay Oscar), Django Unchained (2012, his third Best Original Screenplay Oscar), The Hateful Eight (2015), and the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, his second Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination). He has continuously stated his intention to retire after his 10th feature film. He has been married to Israeli-American singer Daniella Pick since 2018, and the couple has two children.

His name Quentin is from the Latin Quintinus, derived from quintus meaning "fifth" — anchored in Catholic tradition through Saint Quentin of Rome. Quentin has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.