Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is a film director, actor, and Oscar-winning screenwriter. He rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a stylish auteur whose bold use of unrestrained storylines, biting dialogue, and bloody violence brought new life to American film.
He is the most famous of the young directors behind the independent film revolution of the mid-90's. His public persona is that of a motor-mouthed, geeky hipster with a genius knowledge of popular and art-house cinema.
He dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to pursue acting at the James Best Theatre Company.
His first national release, Reservoir Dogs is a stylish, witty, heist movie that set the tone for his later films. Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black, which he turned down. Instead, he left for Amsterdam to work on the for Pulp Fiction. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes film festival, prving that independent films as such could be successful. Pulp Fiction was a complexly plotted film with a similarly brutal wit. Pulp Fiction earned Tarantino and Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and it was also nominated for Best Picture.
After successes with "Four Rooms" and "Jackie Brown", he postponed other projects to write and direct Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of Chinese martial arts, Japanese film, Spaghetti Westerns and Italian horror. The films are based on "The Bride" character that he and Uma Thurman had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino is also given credit as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro of the 2005 stylized film Sin City.
He is known for creating fictional brands such as Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burgers that have shown up in several movies, including Pilp Fiction, Four Rooms, From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. The director is also known for his love of breakfast cereal, and many of his movies feature brands such as Fruit Brute (a monster cereal similar to Franken Berry and Count Chocula) in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.