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Quentin Tarantino (born March 27, 1963Quentin Tarantino is an American film director, actor, and Oscar winning screenwriter who 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.

He is the most famous of the young directors behind the independent film revolution of the 1990s, well-known for his public persona as a motor-mouthed, geeky hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of both popular and art-house cinema.

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Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee to Tony Tarantino, an actor and musician of Italian descent, and Connie McHugh of half-Irish and half-Cherokee Indian extraction, who, shortly after his birth married musician Curt Zastoupil with whom Quentin would form a strong bond. He attended kindergarten in San Gabriel Valley from 1968. In 1971 the family moved to El Segundo, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles where Tarantino attended Hawthorne Christian School. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of sixteen, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company. At the age of 22, he wrote his first . In 1984, Tarantino started working at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives where he struck up a friendship with fellow worker Roger Avary with whom he would later collaborate. He continued to study acting at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills but began to concentrate mainly on to a movie make-up company for $1,500 and the promise to do the make-up on a future film that would turn out to be "Reservoir Dogs." His first major break came with the sale of another , written with Roger Avary. It was made into a film starring Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater. He wrote the original screenplay for came from. It should be acknowledged that it was changed significantly by subsequent writers (including Oliver Stone), so much so that he declined a Screenwriting credit in lieu of a Story credit.

The sale of (eventually released in 1993) garnered him attention. He met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party and Bender encouraged Tarantino to go write a film. The end product was was read by director Monte Hellman who helped secure funding from Live Entertainment and also Tarantino's directorship of the film. Harvey Keitel heard of the through his wife, who attended a class with Lawrence Bender (see Reservoir Dogs special edition DVD commentary for the full story). He read the (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival and practically revolutionised the independent film industry. It was a complexly plotted film with a similarly brutal wit. It featured many critically acclaimed performances, and was noted for reviving the career of John Travolta. also earned Tarantino and Avery Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and it was also nominated for Best Picture.

After is a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez.

Tarantino's next film was (1997), an adaptation of a novel by his mentor Elmore Leonard. An homage to blaxploitation films, it also starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre's films of the 1970s. In 1998, he turned his attention to the Broadway stage, where he starred in a revival of (released as two films, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of (Chinese martial arts), Japanese film, and Spaghetti Westerns. It was based on a character (The Bride) and plot that he and was not in competition, but it did screen on the final night in its original 3+ hour version.

Tarantino is given credit as "Special Guest Director" for his work directing the car sequence between Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro of the 2005 neo-noir film .

On February 24, 2005 it was announced he would direct the season finale of CSI. The two-hour episode, "Grave Danger," was aired on May 19 to stellar ratings and reviews. He also directed an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Although Tarantino is best known for his work behind the camera, he's also made recent appearances on the small screen in the first and third seasons of the TV show , which he is co-directing with Robert Rodriguez. He has stated he will "probably" follow that with before filming, making a 2006 release extremely unlikely. Among his current producing credits are the horror flick,

Tarantino's movies are renowned for their sharp dialogue, splintered chronology, and pop culture obsessions. Often they are viewed as graphically violent, and certainly in his key films there are copious amounts of both spattered and flowing blood. However, what affects people most is the casualness, and even macabre humour, of the violence, as well as the tension and grittiness of these scenes.

Fictional brands such as Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burgers from . The director is also known for his love of breakfast cereal, and many of his movies feature brands such as Fruit Brute (a spin off of the more popular Franken Berry) in

Tarantino is widely known as a director who is very much a "film-geek", with an astonishing, encyclopedic knowledge of movies, film criticism, and film history. Particularly, he has a vast knowledge of foreign films, genre films and little-known pieces of cinema. He is a declared lover of exploitation films, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, giallo horror, French New Wave, and British cinema. His love of those genres is mirrored in his works -- all of his films regularly quote other movies and genres in their s, stories and dialogue. He once summed it up by saying, "I never went to film school; I went to films."

In the 2002

Tarantino has come under criticism for his use of racial epithets in his films, particularly the word , Lee said: "I'm not against the word... and I use it, but Quentin is infatuated with the word. What does he want? To be made an honorary black man?"

An oft-cited example is a scene in in which a character named Jimmie Dimmick, portrayed by Tarantino himself, rebukes Samuel L. Jackson's character, Jules Winnfield, for using his house as "dead nigger storage", followed by a rant that uses the word profusely. The fact that Jimmie had a black wife was also seen as an insult, specifically by Spike Lee. Lee makes direct reference to this in his film when the character Thomas Dunwitty states: "Please don't get offended by my use of the quote-unquote N word. I got a black wife and three biracial children, so I feel I have a right to use that word. I don't give a damn what Spike says, Tarantino is right. Nigger is just a word."

Tarantino has defended his use of the word by arguing that black audiences have an appreciation of his blaxploitation-influenced films that eludes some of his critics, and, indeed, that , but that was, pretty much, the "main" audience. If I had any of them in mind, I was thinking of that because I was always thinking of watching it in a black theatre. I didn't have audiences ridiculously in mind because I am the audience, but that works well for that too because I go to black theatres. To me it is a black film.

Tarantino has also been criticized for allegedly plagiarizing ideas, scenes, and lines of dialogue from other films. For example, the general plot of , and the events of the adrenaline-injection scene closely resemble a story related in Martin Scorsese's documentary .

Much debate has been sparked on when such references cease to be tributes and become plagiarism. Tarantino, for his part, has always been open and unapologetic about appropriating ideas from films he admires (see , a two-part homage to some of his favorite films that features such obvious plagiarizing, it practically is excused.

One of Tarantino's closest friends is fellow director Robert Rodriguez (the pair often refer to each other as brothers). Their biggest collaborations have been . They are both members of A Band Apart, a production company that also features directors John Woo and Luc Besson. Rodriguez scored Kill Bill: Volume 2 for one dollar - in return, Tarantino directed a scene in Rodriguez's 2005 film Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous actresses, including Sofia Coppola, the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning writer, 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.Although all of his films feature elements of crime, Tarantino's only brush with "real" crime was an arrest for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel when he was 15 years old. The book is the first Leonard book to feature the characters of Louis and Ordell, whom Tarantino would bring to life with his 1997 film 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 , the Bride (Uma Thurman) was also captured and buried alive in a coffin. The episode was delayed in being shown in the UK as the broadcast date coincided with the terrorist attacks in London and it was felt that the underground theme in the episode would cause offense. This double-length episode has recently found its way to its own DVD Release on October 10, 2005. Tarantino was also nominated for an Emmy for his role in this episode.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!"He often frames characters with doorways and shows them opening and closing doors. Much of the violence and minor character dialogue is offscreen in his films.The Mexican standoff: All his movies feature a scene in which three or more characters are pointing guns at each other at the same time., Kathy Griffin as an accident witness, Phil LaMarr as Marvin, Julia Sweeney as the junkyard guy's daughter in Widely imitated quick cuts of character's hands performing actions in extreme closeup, a technique reminiscent of Brian De Palma.Long closeup of a person's face while someone else speaks off-screen (closeup of The Bride while Bill talks, of Butch while Marsellus talks).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. The trunk shot was also used in ever uses the bathroom in normal movies, Tarantino often includes a toilet scene (e.g. Tim Roth in Another 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 LiuQuentin Tarantino is half-Japanese, half-Chinese American, and her best-friend in the film, Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus), is half-Japanese, half-French.Always has a scene where a character is followed around by the camera for a fairly long period of time.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.Themes of foot fetishism are prominent in Tarantino's films, especially Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Kill Bill Vol. 2. According to Uma Thurman, Tarantino is known to have a foot fetish.

In recent years, Tarantino has used his Hollywood power to give smaller and foreign films more attention that they otherwise would not have received. These films are usually given the credit "Presented by Quentin Tarantino." The first of these productions was in 2001 with the Hong Kong martial arts film which made over $14 million in the United States, seven times its budget, thanks to Tarantino. In 2004 he brought the Chinese martial arts film to U.S. shores. It ended up having a #1 opening at the box office and making $53.5 million. In 2006 the latest "Quentin Tarantino presents" production, , opened at #1 at the box office with a $20.1 million opening weekend, good for 8th all time in the month of January.

Machiyama, Tomohiro. Tarantino Interview regarding "Kill Bill", Japattack. August 28, 2003. Retrieved December 7, 2005.