it is his distinct pure blend of comedy and violence that appeals to critics and cinephiles, it is probably the violence that accounts for Quentin’s status as a youth icon. There is a sense of danger in his work. His films have in many ways been treated like a banned substance: Reservoir Dogs waited more than two years to get a video release in Britain and there was much debate about whether Natural Born Killers would be allowed cinema exhibition in the same country. This outlaw status is a crucial part of the Tarantino myth. What troubles critics about his work – his lack of moral perspective – is precisely what most appeals to his young fans.
Although in person, Tarantino may resemble a harmless trainspotter, it is the blank-eyed violence of his movies, their callous laughter at the dark, that has made him Hollywood’s first rock star director. Yet he has remained approachable and exudes the easy charm of one completely unaware of his status as the world’s hottest film director. It is as if he’s saying, if I can do it, so can you…
| Avary, Roger | Film maker |
| Beardsley, Jamie | Assistant director/producer |
| Bender, Lawrence | Actor-turned-producer |
| Buscemi, Steve | Actor |
| Gladstein, Richard N. | Executive producer |
| Hamann, Craig | Actor/writer |
| Hellman, Monte | Film maker |
| Jackson, Samuel L. | Actor |
| Jaymes, Cathryn | Personal manager |
| Keitel, Harvey | Actor/producer |
| Lovelace, Grace | University lecturer |
| Lucarelli, Jack | Actor/ drama coach |
| Madsen, Michael | Actor |
| Margolis, Stanley | Personal manager/producer |
| Martinez, Gerry | Film geek/video store clerk |
| Murphy, Don | Producer |
| Roth, Tim | Actor |
| Scott, Tony | Film maker |
| Spiegel, Scott | Film maker |
| Stoltz, Eric | Actor |
| Stone, Oliver | Film maker |
| Tarantino, Quentin | Film maker/actor |
| Thurman, Uma | Actor |
| Tierney, Lawrence | Actor |
| Travolta, John | Actor |
| Turner, Rich | Actor |
| Vossler, Rand | Producer/director |
| Weinstein, Harvey | Miramax |
| Weinstein, Bob | Miramax |
| Willis, Bruce | Actor |
| Zastoupil, Connie | Parent |
| Zastoupil, Curtis | Step-parent |
| Zimmerman, Paul | Movie magazine editor |
‘I’m telling a story you’ve seen over and over again. We’re going to follow the oldest set-ups in the world, but then we’re going to go to the moon’
Quentin Tarantino
‘I don’t care what you write, just so you get it right and just so it sells’
Serial killer Ted Bundy to his biographers as he awaited the death sentence
‘Fate just stepped in and fucked me over’
Quentin Tarantino
‘It’s a hard world for little things’
Lillian Gish, in The Night of the Hunter, 1955
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, 27 MARCH 1963
Connie Tarantino, a pretty, young trainee nurse at the Tennessee State University Hospital, hurried out into the cold rain from her tiny, one-bedroom apartment on the edge of town to the waiting ambulance. She was worried. The pains in her stomach indicated that her pregnancy might end prematurely. She wanted to have her baby like all the other mothers she had attended during her training. But life never seemed to go smoothly for Connie. Here she was, pregnant at 16 and abandoned by her actor husband, who had jumped ship within a couple of months of their wedding, not even aware that she was expecting a baby.
No one in Connie’s family had seemed all that surprised when she had announced her marriage at 15, and then that she was pregnant two weeks before her 16th birthday.
Connie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1940s, when her mother was just 17. (Connie did not want the specific year of her birth made public: ‘The day and the month are September 3 – a gentleman shouldn’t ask a woman her age.’) Her father died when she was a baby and at the age of two she was adopted by the man who married her mother. Her stepfather took the family to Ohio from Tennessee, but Connie’s relationship with her stepfather and mother rapidly disintegrated until, at the age of 12, she moved in with her Aunt Sadie in Pico Rivera, California. Aunt Sadie had no children of her own and provided her young niece with more encouragement and support than she received from her parents. Connie has specifically requested that none of her immediate family should be named in this book because she is estranged from her mother and says, ‘I do not want any of my relatives to find me. I don’t want them to know about Quentin.’
The root of the problems between mother and daughter lay in her mother’s penchant for alcohol. She would go on enormous drinking sprees during which she would lose all sense of parental responsibility. She blamed much of that alcohol abuse on something that Connie was very proud of – her family’s Cherokee and Irish ancestry. By an odd coincidence, Connie’s maternal grandfather had been full blooded-Cherokee married to an Irish woman and her paternal grandmother was Irish, married to a Cherokee.
From the age of ten, Connie had been like a mother to her mother. She continually