Tarantino anniversary

Photo: Reuters

Today Quentin Tarantino - a lover of strong words, long monologues, unfunny jokes, women's feet and blood, blood, blood - is 50 years old. PublicPost remembered why this unusual man, who grew up in a black neighborhood and learned to make films while working in a video store, is loved and called a “cult director” during his lifetime.

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, to sixteen-year-old Connie McHugh and Tony Tarantino, an Italian-American actor and musician. Then the legends begin. For example, that Quentin was named Quentin after the heroine of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, Quentina. At the age of 15, Tarantino dropped out of school and got a job at a video rental store, and attended acting classes in the evenings.

Tarantino wrote the script for his first full-length film, Reservoir Dogs, in three weeks. Before that, he wrote the screenplay for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. This film is famous not only for the fact that there is a lot of delicious killing, but also for the fact that its heroes Nikki and Mallory have real followers. There is another legend here - supposedly Tarantino demanded that his name be removed from the credits because Stone left no stone unturned in his script.

Tarantino became truly famous in 1994 after the release of Pulp Fiction. Tarantino played his biggest role, the paranoid psychopath Richie Gekko, in 1996 in his friend Robert Rodriguez's film From Dusk Till Dawn.

Tarantino released his longest film, Kill Bill, in two parts, which were released in 2002 and 2004. It is remembered for its wonderful soundtrack and incredibly spectacular bloody exploits of Uma Thurman.

In 2009, Tarantino screened Inglourious Basterds, about evil Nazis and even more evil Jewish partisans who kill Hitler in a Paris cinema. "Basterds" became Tarantino's highest-grossing film of his entire film career.

Tarantino's last (Tarantino characters would most likely say "extreme") film, Django Unchained, was released on December 25, 2012. Unlike all of Tarantino's other films, this one is deeply moral and even humanistic. That doesn't stop it from being as bloody as all the previous ones.

That's what Tarantino says

“I was a tough guy before I was recognized. Because I felt that I was as good as I am now, but no one suspected it.”

"I'm kind of proud that I've achieved everything I've achieved without even a high school education. It makes me smart. It impresses people. I'm not a big fan of the American public education system. I hated school so much that I ran away in the ninth grade. The only thing is , what I regret - although not very much - is that I thought this horror would last forever. I did not understand that in college it would be different Now, if I did everything again, I. I would have finished school and gone to college.”

“When I worked in a video store, I heard parents scolding their children for always taking movies that they had already seen and loved. After all, a child thinks: “Why take someone who doesn’t know what? I’ll take this tape again." And he watches it for the fifteenth time and sincerely laughs at all the jokes. So I have the psychology of a child - I like this approach."

"Big Ideas ruin movies. In cinema, the most important thing is to make a good movie. And if in the process of working you come up with an idea, that's great. But it shouldn't be a Big Idea, it should be a small idea from which everyone will take something away I mean, if you’re making a movie about how war is bad, then why make a movie at all? If that’s all you want to say, just say it in two words: war is bad.”

"When I sit down to write, I let the movie unfold before my eyes. Sometimes it doesn't work out very well, sometimes you have to look into the deepest corners of your own brain, and that's the beauty of writing, you get pleasure from it - suddenly they drag Jimp and then they start having anal sex. Where does this come from? I have no idea.”

“For me, cinema, cinema is incomparably more important than politics. To be honest, it’s not even possible for me to compare these two things. I not only love watching movies, I live in the world of cinema. Of course, there are cases when politics and cinema intersect. This is very rare cases when it's really good. I was the chairman of the Cannes jury and I declare with all responsibility that Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" would never have received the Palme d'Or if it were not a real movie. This film is. a testament to the intersection of art and politics."

"Life is too short to make one film after another. It's the same as getting married just to get married. I want to fall in love and say: 'What a woman!'

"Want to know my favorite dirty joke? A black guy walks into a Cadillac dealership. The salesman comes up to him and asks, 'Hello, sir.' Are you thinking about buying a Cadillac?” “I’m going to buy a Cadillac,” he answers, “but I’m thinking about chicks.”

This is how Tarantino films

"Pulp Fiction"

"Unkillable"

"From Dusk Till Dawn"

"Four rooms"

"Django Unchained" (soundtrack)

"Natural Born Killers"

"Kill Bill"