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Essay on Quentin Tarantino
After working for four years as a clerk in a Los Angeles video store, he made his feature directorial and screenwriting debut with the brutal, offbeat Reservoir Dogs (1992). Originally slated to be made for a mere $35,000, the film's production budget expanded to $400,000 when Harvey Keitel became enamored of the script and agreed to star. A brilliantly structured, stylized cops-and-robbers drama dealing with the themes of loyalty and betrayal, Reservoir Dogs premiered at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, where it was pointedly snubbed by the jury. Nonetheless, Tarantino was subsequently courted by the industry and lionized by critics as the next Martin Scorsese. Then in the 1993 Cannes film festival Quentin Tarantino, takes the Film industry by surprise by making a movie (Pulp Fiction) out of four strange stories of raw power and suspense.
Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, as the son of a half cherokee, half hillbilly mother named Connie Tarantino. She named him after Burt Reynolds charakter, Quint from the movie Gun-smoke. When Quentin reached the age of two years, the Tarantinos moved to South Los Angeles where he grew up. From an early age, his mother took him to the movies and he immediately experiences a peculiar love and admiration for the cinema itself. At the age of sixteen, Tarantino left school to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. Work and training followed, including employment as an usher at the local Pussycat Theater.
His most publicized place of employment was at Video Archives, where he received an informal film education and where he and Roger Avary spent all day watching, discussing and recommending videos. Although his original game plan was to become an actor, Tarantino soon realized his true calling in life was to be a director. In this age of rampant computer literacy, it is noteworthy that Quentin Tarantino, the much ballyhooed point man for nineties filmmakers, still writes the old fashioned way using a pen (to be precise, he ritualistically purchases three red and three black felt-tip pens before commencing a new screenplay) and a notebook.
Either you revere or revile this latest rock star of film makers, no one is better at creating an amoral, anti-intellectual cinema of viscera than Quentin Tarantino. Dubbed the new Martin Scorsese, Tarantino emerged not as a product of the film school generation, but from the pantheon of filmmakers past and present: the video store. Like the name, Tarantino s scripts offer a cultural-hybrid vision: art-house cinema and syringe-in-the-heart splatter-toon. He made his first film in 1986, My Best Friend s Birthday which ended up unfinished and followed up by writing his first script....
