Quentin Tarantino: the long way to a world of his own

English version of GoGuide’s Bulgarian edition. Bulgarian translation from English: Kristiyana Burdeva.

Quentin Tarantino has spent more than three decades persuading us that splashing fake blood across a screen can be an art form.

It has worked well enough for “Tarantino-esque” to summon a whole universe: elaborate dialogue, stylised violence and music that lodges immediately in the brain. The director as DJ, mixing genres and references, has become one of contemporary cinema’s most influential figures. Yet the beginning offered no guarantee of any of it.

Born in Knoxville in 1963, Quentin Jerome Tarantino spent part of his early adulthood working in a video shop. His early attempt at filmmaking, My Best Friend’s Birthday, was an unruly, unfinished project rather than a triumphant debut. It might have ended someone else’s ambitions. His survived.

Persistence kept him moving.

Selling the screenplay for True Romance helped him take the next step. He drew on pulp storytelling, including the lurid magazines of the Twenties and Thirties: cheap paper, blazing covers, violent tales, masked figures and improbable poses. It was one strand in a much larger education in cinema and popular culture.

He brought those influences to the screen with such confidence that “pulp” became newly associated with his work. He did not invent the tradition, but he gave it a hugely influential modern expression.

It became part of a cinematic language that was unmistakably his.

Reservoir Dogs announced that language. Men around a table discuss tipping and Madonna; suits, pop songs and brutality inhabit the same world. The fictional radio programme K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies supplies familiar music as appalling things unfold. Here is the signature that would shape so much of what followed.

The decisive breakthrough came in 1994 with Pulp Fiction. It revitalised John Travolta’s career, made Uma Thurman an indelible part of Tarantino’s world, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and received seven Oscar nominations, winning for its screenplay. Pulp was now in the title as well as in the sensibility:

a world of sudden violence, emotional cruelty and unstable loyalties,

where self-interest is rarely far away. Jackie Brown found a different rhythm. The two volumes of Kill Bill drew on martial-arts cinema, anime and samurai films, combining revenge with a thread of feeling. Inglourious Basterds (2009) rewrote the Second World War through black humour, long stretches of dialogue and explosive violence, culminating in its audacious fictional killing of Hitler.

Django Unchained (2012) turned towards slavery, following Jamie Foxx’s character in his fight for freedom and his wife Broomhilda. In 2019, Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood returned to another imagined past. It has been tempting to discuss it as a possible farewell, given Tarantino’s repeated talk of retirement. But speculation is not a finished filmography, and no short list can contain everything he has made.

His confidence in the body of work is hardly a secret.

For our part, we would still like another knockout on the big screen. One more film to argue about, return to and carry around in our heads.

Ten unforgettable characters from Quentin Tarantino’s films

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