About Quint Tarantino
Born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino was named, fittingly enough, after a character on a TV show, the half-breed blacksmith Quint played by Burt Reynolds on Gunsmoke. When he was two, the future filmmaker's single mom moved with him to the South Bay area south of Los Angeles, which was his home for the next two decades.
His neighborhood in the city of Torrance was a mixture of black and white, and he was exposed to a wide range of film and pop culture influences. Martial arts movies, for example, continued to play in black neighborhoods for several years after the Kung Fu fad ended elsewhere; Tarantino was able to "cross the tracks" to continue watching them until well into the 1970s.
Tarantino quit school at 17 to take acting classes and support himself with odd jobs. At 22 he found a second home of sorts at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where his voluminous knowledge of old movies finally began to come in handy. With co-workers Roger Avery and Jerry Martinez, Tarantino turned Video Archives into an impromptu film school. He began writing as a way to supply practice scenes for his acting classes.
After laboring for time with Avery and some other friends on an abortive shoe string feature, My Best Friends Wedding, a raunchy buddy film on the scale of Kevin Smith's Clerks, Tarantino spent several frustrating years writing and trying to set up two scripts, each intended to be his directorial debut. Partly out of frustration at the difficulty of setting up a "real movie" with an unknown writer attached to direct,
Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs in 1991.
Dogs was intentionally written to be the most minimal project imaginable: a story of a heist in which the robbery occurred off screen, pages and pages of dialog requiring only a single set. It was intended to be a super-cheap 16 mm with Tarantino and his Video Archives buddies playing all the parts.
Luckily, an aspiring producer Lawrence Bender read and loved the Dogs script. He begged Tarantino to give him a month to try to set it up as one of those "real movies." It was Bender who got the script to actor Harvey Keitel, and it was Keitel's enthusiasm that attracted several other good actors and a eventually a decent production budget.
Shot in less than a month in LA locations, with a standout cast that came to include Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Laurence Tierney, Chris Penn, and Tarantino himself in addition to Keitel, Dogs was a phenomenal success, first at the Sundance Film Festival and then with the world at large.
Suddenly Tarantino was hot, and both of the scripts he had been working on before Dog quickly sold: they became True Romance (1992, directed by Tony Scott) and Natural Born Killers (1993, heavily re-written and directed by Oliver Stone).
1994's Pulp Fiction was a multi-layered, time-bending, crime fiction collage that wove the stories of several characters together with world-class narrative gusto. A 3-D chess game of a movie, Pulp single-handedly restored the career of '70s icon John Travolta to its proper eminence, cemented the movie-star status of actor Samuel L. Jackson, and launched Tarantino's working relationship with the performer he has since described
as "my actress," Uma Thurman.
After a three-year lay-off, Tarantino wrote and directed Jackie Brown, in 1997, a crime caper based on Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. Pam Grier garnered both Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations for her performance in the title role, and co-star Robert Forster who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. Filling out the once-in-a-lifetime cast were Samuel L. Jackson (also nominated for a Golden Globe),
Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda and Michael Keaton.
Tarantino's first career goal was to become an actor, and he has continued to play roles in his own films and in the work of others. He was the thief known only as Mr. Brown ("That's a little too close to 'Mr.Shit,'") in Reservoir Dogs and the jittery Jimmie Dimmick, saddled with a fresh corpse, Pulp Fiction. In the "Man From Hollywood" section of Four Rooms he was a blow-hard movie director. He also played
bandit George Clooney's loony brother, Richard Gecko, in Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, played the title role in Jack Baren's Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995) and appeared in Spike Lee's Girl 6 (1996).
With his production partner, Lawrence Bender, through their company A Band Apart Productions, Tarantino served as executive producer to October Film's Killing Zoe, directed by Roger Avary. He "presented" the 2001 domestic release of Master Yuen Wo Ping's 1993 martial arts classic Iron Monkey" and served as executive producer of Reb Braddock's black comedy Curdled (1996) and Julia Sweeny's concert film God said,
'HA!' (1999).
In the four years that elapsed between the release of Jackie Brown and the production of Kill Bill, Tarantino was hard at work on a script for a war movie, Inglorious Bastards, which has been announced as a Miramax project for 2004.
ABOUT THE CAST
Uma Thurman
Uma Thurman has proven herself to be one of the most versatile young actresses around, playing a wide variety of compelling characters. The daughter of a psychologist and a college professor, Thurman was raised in Amherst, Massachusetts and Woodstock, New York. She attended a preparatory school in New England, where at fifteen she was discovered by two New York agents. At sixteen she transferred to the Professional Children's
School in New York City to pursue an acting career.
Thurman first came forcefully to public attention in 1988, when she segued from Johnny Be Good, opposite Anthony Michael Hall, to an eye-catching cameo as Venus on the half shell in Terry Gillian's epic fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1998). She went on to receive world-wide critical acclaim in her third movie, for her portrayal of a virginal 18th century convent girl, Cecile de Volanges, coldly seduced by a ruthless
John Malkovich in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons.
Thurman's career has been defined from the beginning by a bold but highly selective choice of roles and collaborators: no commercial throwaways allowed. The following year she starred for adventurous director Philip Kaufman in Henry & June (1990), playing the neurotic and exotic bisexual spouse of archetypal bohemian novelist Henry Miller (Fred Ward).
In Mad Dog and Glory, 1993 she played a barmaid who becomes an indentured servant to Robert De Niro for saving Bill Murray's life. Her most eccentric movie to date is Gus Van Sant's film Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,1994 based upon the Tom Robbins novel, in which she starred as Sissy Hankshaw, a big-thumbed, bisexual hippie hitchhiker.
In 1996, Thurman received an Academy Award nomination for Quentin Tarantino's critically lauded Pulp Fiction, in which she played Mia Wallace, a sexy and comedic mobster's wife. Later that year, she was seen in the period romance A Month by the Lake, with Vanessa Redgrave, and the contemporary romance Beautiful Girls, directed by Ted Demme. Thurman next appeared in The Truth About Cats And Dogs (1996), Batman & Robin (1997),
Gattacca (1997), Les Miserables (1998), and The Avengers (1998). In the spring of 1999, she made her stage debut in an updated version of Moliere's The Misanthrope at The Classic Stage Company in New York.
Her most recent films include Woody Allen's Sweet And Lowdown, opposite Sean Penn and Samantha Morton; Vatel, opposite Gerard Depardieu and Tim Roth; the Merchant/Ivory Henry James adaptation The Golden Bowl, with Nick Nolte; and Tape with Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award as Best Supporting Actress.
Thurman recently produced and starred in the HBO film, Hysterical Blindness, directed by Mira Nair, with Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands. She won a 2003 Golden Globe for Best Actress for her portrayal of Debby Miller in the film, and was nominated for a SAG Award.
Lucy Lui
A native of Queens, New York, Lucy Liu attended NYU and later received a Bachelor of Science degree in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan. During her senior year at Michigan, she auditioned for a student theater production of Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland. Hoping to be cast in a supporting role, Lucy was instead cast as the lead, and her acting career was born.
On television, Lucy appeared as the unforgettable Ling Woo in the hit Fox series Ally McBeal. (1998-2001) That immensely popular role brought Lucy a great deal of industry recognition and fan support. In 1999, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and, in 2000, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series. She guest-starred on HBO's Sex and the City and
has lent her voice to such popular animated series as The Simpsons, Futurama, and King of the Hill.
After playing significant supporting roles in several films, including Jerry Maguire (1996), City of Industry (1997), and Gridlock'd (1997), Liu made a strong impression on the big screen playing a snide dominatrix opposite Mel Gibson in the box office hit Payback (1999) and in a sassy starring role with Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson in Touchstone Pictures Play It To The Bone (1999).
Her blossoming film career was thrust into over-drive in 2000 when she joined Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore in the blockbuster hit Charlie's Angels. She also appeared that year opposite martial arts legend Jackie Chan in Universal's hit comedy Shanghai Noon. In 2002 Liu starred opposite Antonio Banderas in Warner Bros.' action-thriller Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and in the Oscar-winning Miramax movie musical Chicago. She can
currently be seen flying high in Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle.
She recently signed a deal to executive produce and star in a contemporary big-screen version of Charlie Chan for 20th Century Fox.
Daryl Hannah
Daryl Hannah was born and raised in Chicago, where she was selected while still in school to play a victim of lethal telekinesis in Brian De Palma's psycho-thriller The Fury (1978).
She made her first made a strong individual impression on audiences after re-locating to Los Angeles, when she was cast the acrobatic android Pris in Ridley Scott's science fiction classic Blade Runner (1982). The erotic melodrama Summer Lovers (1982), James Foley's Reckless (1984), and above all Ron Howard's Splash (1984), as a mermaid named Madison who captivates Tom Hanks, established the willowy actress as one the definitive
Hollywood icons of the 1980s.
Since then, Hannah has appeared in more than 30 feature films including The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Wall Street (1987), Roxanne (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989), At Play In The Fields of the Lord (1991), and Grumpy Old Men (1993).
She recently made her stage debut in London in The Seven Year Itch, a revival of the George Axelrod play directed by Michael Radford. She subsequently acted in Radford's semi-improvised film about Hollywood strippers, Dancing At The Blue Iguana (2000). She also directed, produced and shot the documentary Strip Notes, based upon her research for the role; the 30-minute film appears as a special feature on the Blue Iguana DVD.
She received the Berlin International Film Festival's Jury Award for Best Short for The Last Supper, a film that she wrote, produced and directed.
Daryl Hannah can currently be seen the Polish Bros' Northfork, and this fall in John Sayles' Casa De Los Babys, playing a woman who travels to South American to adopt a child. |
