The video-store auteur who broke American independent cinema open in 1992 and has spent thirty years arguing for cinema's older traditions.
Quentin Tarantino has directed ten features (he counts Kill Bill as one) and announced his intention to retire after the eleventh. He has no formal film-school training. He worked at the Video Archives in Manhattan Beach as a clerk in the 1980s, watching everything; he wrote screenplays in his spare time; he sold True Romance and Natural Born Killers in 1993 and used the proceeds to finance Reservoir Dogs through Lawrence Bender.
What he brought to American independent cinema in 1992 was a synthesis no one else was attempting: French New Wave structural play, Hong Kong action choreography, grindhouse exploitation, blaxploitation, 1970s American character cinema, and the rhythms of working-class American conversation. He wrote dialogue at a length no Hollywood screenplay would risk and refused to cut it down.
He has never made a film someone else wrote. He has been criticised, for thirty years, for the foot fetishism, the racial epithets in his scripts, his association with Harvey Weinstein, and his treatment of Uma Thurman during the Kill Bill car-crash sequence. He has also been credited, by almost everyone, with reshaping what an American studio film is allowed to look like.
“When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘No, I went to films.’”
Almost every Tarantino feature is told in titled chapters or non-linear segments. Reservoir Dogs is chronologically scrambled; Pulp Fiction's three storylines overlap and resolve out of order; Kill Bill is openly numbered. The chapter device is borrowed from novels — particularly Elmore Leonard, whose influence Tarantino has openly acknowledged — and from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.
The structural play is not decoration. The non-linear ordering of Pulp Fiction means Vincent dies in the middle of the film and reappears, alive, in the final scene. The audience knows what's coming. The tension shifts from 'what happens' to 'how does it happen'.
A Tarantino scene typically opens with a piece of conversation that has no immediate narrative function — Royale with cheese, foot massages, the meaning of Like a Virgin — and slowly reveals itself as the actual stakes of the scene. The opening of Inglourious Basterds is the high-water mark of this: twenty minutes of farmhouse interrogation, almost entirely in dialogue, that becomes the most tense sequence of the year.
He writes the way Elmore Leonard writes: people don't say what they mean; they circle. The pleasure for the audience is watching the circle close.
Tarantino does not use original scores. He compiles soundtracks from records he already owns or rediscovers — Dick Dale's Misirlou, Stealers Wheel's Stuck in the Middle With You, Nancy Sinatra's Bang Bang. The soundtracks are themselves now famous and have driven catalogue sales of records that had been out of print.
He has occasionally commissioned new work — Ennio Morricone composed an original score for The Hateful Eight at age 87 and won his first competitive Oscar for it.
Tarantino's films, by his own framing, exist in two universes: the 'realer than real' world (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and the 'movie-movie' world that characters in the first universe watch (Kill Bill, From Dusk Till Dawn). Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs and Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction are brothers. Lee Donowitz is a Hollywood producer whose father is Donny Donowitz from Inglourious Basterds. The cross-referencing is mostly for fun, but it's consistent.
If you've never watched a Tarantino film:
French New Wave (especially Godard, from whom Tarantino's 1991 production company A Band Apart takes its name from Bande à part), Hong Kong action cinema (Ringo Lam, John Woo), Italian giallo, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks, Brian De Palma, Elmore Leonard's novels.