The Clerk at the Counter
In the back of a video store in Manhattan Beach, California, sometime around 1985, a young man with atrocious handwriting and no high school diploma was taking a final exam nobody had assigned him. He had organized the entire stock in his head — not alphabetically, not by release date, but by a taxonomy of his own invention. There were "Two Guys and a Girl" movies (Jules and Jim, Bande à Part, A Girl in Every Port). There were "A Bunch of Guys on a Mission" movies, preferably World War II. There were "Mother Nature Goes Ape-shit" movies (Frogs, Willard, not really Jaws). There were "I Married a Whore but Can't Stand to Watch Her Work" movies (Mona Lisa). And there were "New Faces" movies, which were about plastic surgery. The categories kept multiplying, breeding sub-genres, spawning cross-references, until the shelves of Video Archives became something between a lending library and a neural map — every VHS tape a synapse firing toward some future work that didn't yet exist because the person who would make it was still earning $150 a week rewinding cassettes.
His name was Quentin Jerome Tarantino. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 27, 1963, the only child of Connie McHugh — part Cherokee, part Irish, a nurse — and Tony Tarantino, an actor who left before his son arrived. The family relocated to California when the boy was four. He never went to film school. He never finished high school. The only subject that appealed to him was history. "History was cool and I did well there," he later explained, "because it was kind of like the movies."
What followed over the next three decades — nine feature films, two Academy Awards for screenwriting, a Palme d'Or, a body of work that reshaped the grammar of American cinema and spawned an entire generation of imitators who understood none of what they were copying — all of it can be traced back to that counter at Video Archives, where a clerk who had never directed a single frame of film was already, in some essential way, a filmmaker. He just hadn't found the blank page yet.
By the Numbers
The Tarantino Canon
9Feature films directed (1992–2019)
2Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay
$1.9B+Combined worldwide box office gross
$1M → $95MBudget range, Reservoir Dogs to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
10Self-imposed career limit for feature films
$30KPlanned budget for Reservoir Dogs before Lawrence Bender intervened
1977–1994Years spent working in/around video stores before Pulp Fiction
The Education of a Dropout
The mythology has become so familiar it functions as shorthand: video store clerk becomes auteur. But the mythology, as mythologies tend to do, compresses a decade of grinding, failing, and obsessive self-invention into a montage. The reality was slower, messier, and considerably more instructive.
Tarantino's mother was strict about nightmares — after a certain age, she sent the boy back to his own bed, and he learned not to have them — but permissive about movies. His earliest memory involves his grandmother taking him to see a John Wayne picture. By seven, he was absorbing violent, R-rated films that most parents would have forbidden: Deliverance, The Getaway, 100 Rifles. His mother took him. "Your parents can bring you in," he said decades later. "That's the point of the R rating." The young Tarantino's creative impulses manifested in unsettling ways. "He wrote me sad Mother's Day stories," Connie once told Entertainment Weekly. "He'd always kill me and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother's eye."
He loathed school. He skipped classes to watch movies or read comics. After dropping out, he worked as an usher at an adult film theater. He took acting classes. He appeared on an episode of The Golden Girls as an Elvis Presley impersonator — a detail so perfectly Tarantinian it seems apocryphal, but isn't.
Then he found Video Archives.
Lance Lawson, the store's owner, had built something between a business and a salon — a collection so deep it ran from mainstream Hollywood to Italian giallo to the furthest reaches of exploitation cinema. Tarantino was a customer first, haunting the aisles with the intensity of a graduate student who'd accidentally wandered into an archive perfectly calibrated to his obsessions. Lawson offered him a job. "I was 'yeah, I'd love a job here. That would be a dream.' And it was," Tarantino told the BBC.
What happened at Video Archives over the next several years was, in effect, a self-designed curriculum more rigorous than anything a film school could have provided, because it had no syllabus, no reading list, no professor insisting on canonical hierarchies. Tarantino didn't just watch. He dissected — rewinding scenes, studying camera placement, analyzing narrative structure, picking apart what made dialogue sing. His co-worker Jerry Martinez remembered it plainly: "This was one of the few places Quentin could come as a regular guy and get a job and become like a star. Because he was like the star of the store."
Roger Avary, a fellow clerk, shared his mania. The two argued about films with the vehemence of theologians disputing doctrine. "The thing about film geeks," Tarantino later observed, "is they have an intense love for film. An incredible passion, they devote a lot of time, they devote a lot of money and they devote a lot of their life to the following of film. But they don't really have that much to show for all this devotion, other than their opinion. So opinion is everything."
Opinion as currency, knowledge as status, conversation as combat. These were the values of Video Archives, and they became the values of Tarantino's cinema. His characters would not stop talking — about hamburgers, about foot massages, about the relative merits of The Guns of Navarone versus Where Eagles Dare — because for Tarantino, talk was the action. The scene where you discussed the scene was the scene.
Five Thousand Dollars and Nothing to Show
The first attempt to convert all that stored knowledge into a film nearly killed the enterprise before it began.
Tarantino and his friend Craig Hamman co-wrote a screwball comedy called My Best Friend's Birthday, which they planned to star in themselves. They borrowed a 16mm camera. They shot on weekends, whenever Tarantino had scraped together enough money for film stock. They couldn't afford to process the footage as they went — so they shot blind, accumulating cans of undeveloped film the way a gambler accumulates IOUs. When, after three years of weekend shooting, they finally got the footage processed in 1987, the verdict was devastating: the majority was amateurish, unusable. The project was abandoned. Total cost: approximately $5,000. Total product: nothing.
Or not quite nothing. The later footage showed flashes of something — a voice finding itself, a sensibility cohering out of the noise. Tarantino had learned what he didn't know. And buried in the wreckage of My Best Friend's Birthday was a hard lesson that would prove more valuable than any film school certificate: the technical side could be learned, but the script was the irreducible thing. The script was the guide. "The cinematographer knows more about cinematography than I do," he would later say. "The editor knows more about editing than I do. But I know more about this script than they do."
The Hundred-Dollar Option
The path from failed student film to Reservoir Dogs ran through a series of connections so improbable they read like the plot of a heist movie — which, in a sense, is exactly what they were.
Through a screenwriter friend, Tarantino met filmmaker Scott Spiegel, who ran in the same indie horror circles as Sam Raimi. Through Spiegel, doors opened. Tarantino sold two screenplays — True Romance and Natural Born Killers — and for the first time in his life had money. Not much money: the plan was to take approximately $30,000 from the True Romance sale, shoot Reservoir Dogs on 16mm in a muffler shop or something similarly cheap, and take it on the festival circuit. It was a plan born of years of rejection, of being told no so many times that the idea of anyone giving him real money seemed like a hallucination.
Lawrence Bender — a producer who had read the Reservoir Dogs script and recognized something in it that transcended its modest ambitions — made a counterproposal. "Quentin, this is a pretty good script," Bender told him. "I mean, we could actually get real money and make a real movie." Tarantino's response was the response of a man who had been hurt before: "No, man, I've been hearing that for years. No one's going to give me money to make a movie. I haven't done shit."
Bender asked for three months. If he couldn't drum up real interest, he'd help Tarantino make the micro-budget version. Tarantino agreed. Bender paid him a hundred dollars for a three-month option.
The script reached Harvey Keitel — the actor who had starred in Mean Streets, who had been directed by Scorsese and Ridley Scott, who was, in other words, the real thing. Keitel read the script and said something that no one in the industry had said about Tarantino before: "I haven't seen characters like these in years." He signed on as both actor and producer.
Reservoir Dogs was shot for roughly $1.2 million. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992 and detonated. The film — a structurally complex, ferociously violent, dialogue-heavy crime picture about a jewelry heist that goes wrong, told almost entirely in the aftermath — became the most talked-about debut in American independent cinema since sex, lies, and videotape. Audiences were entranced. Some walked out. A few reportedly fainted during the ear-severing scene. The video store clerk had arrived.
My advice for when you want to find a story you want to tell is: What is a movie you want to see? What is it that you want to contribute? There's a whole lot of movies you could see without you. What's the movie that we have never seen because you haven't made it. Make that movie.
Amsterdam, Alone, With Twelve Cups of Coffee
After making $50,000 on Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino got on a plane with a suitcase full of crime novels and flew to Amsterdam. He rented a one-room apartment. No telephone. No fax. He started writing.
The genesis of what would become Pulp Fiction actually predated Reservoir Dogs entirely. Years earlier, Tarantino and Avary had conceived an idea for a short film — an anthology structure inspired by Mario Bava's 1963 Italian horror film Black Sabbath, with three separate stories sharing a criminal underworld. They planned to write one section each, with a third filmmaker contributing the remaining piece. That filmmaker never materialized. While staying at his mother's house, preparing to write the anthology, Tarantino heard something else — "a set of bizarre criminal characters speaking to him," as Mark Seal later reported in Vanity Fair. Those characters became Reservoir Dogs, and the anthology was shelved.
Now, flush with the modest success of his debut, Tarantino returned to the abandoned project. He walked around Amsterdam. He drank twelve cups of coffee a day. He filled notebooks with his atrocious handwriting. "I just had this cool writing existence," he recalled. "I didn't have to worry about money. I would get up and walk around Amsterdam, and then drink like 12 cups of coffee, spending my entire morning writing."
The structure that emerged was audacious: three interlocking criminal narratives, told out of chronological order, sharing characters who shifted between the foreground and background of each other's stories. A hit man takes his boss's wife to dinner. A boxer double-crosses a crime lord. Two armed robbers hold up a diner. A crime-scene "cleaner" arrives in a tuxedo. The whole thing was woven together like a jazz composition — riffs, callbacks, temporal dislocations — with dialogue so alive it seemed to be writing itself. Tarantino later described his ambition: "I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don't: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story."
Avary joined him in Amsterdam. So did Hollywood executive producer Stacey Sher, and the three of them crammed into the one-bedroom apartment. The question of credit — how much of the script Avary contributed — would become a source of lasting friction. Avary believed they'd co-written the screenplay. Tarantino disagreed, claiming Avary's contribution was limited to the second story (the boxer's narrative, for which Avary was reportedly paid $25,000). The credit that appeared on the finished film — "Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, Stories by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary" — reflected Tarantino's version. At the Oscars, they shared the award for Best Original Screenplay. But the relationship was never quite the same.
The completed script was a sensation. Tarantino's agent at William Morris Endeavor shopped it around Hollywood, and every major studio passed. The violence. The heroin. The male rape. The nonlinear structure. It was too demented, too risky, too Tarantino. TriStar's studio chief Mike Medavoy deemed it unfilmable.
Harvey Weinstein — then running Miramax under Disney's umbrella, hungry for the kind of prestige that only controversial art could provide — read the script and moved immediately. He brought it to Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg for clearance. Katzenberg's response: "Easy on the heroin scene, if you can, but that is one of the best scripts I have ever read. Even though you don't need it, I am giving you my blessing."
Royale with Cheese
The casting of Pulp Fiction was itself a kind of creative demolition.
Tarantino wanted John Travolta for Vincent Vega. The choice was, by any commercial standard, perverse. "John Travolta was at that time as cold as they get," recalled Mike Simpson, Tarantino's agent. "He was less than zero." Travolta — who had been the most electric screen presence of the late 1970s, who had made the world want to dance in Saturday Night Fever and Grease — had spent the better part of a decade making unwatchable films, gaining weight, and receding into Scientology. Nobody wanted him.
Weinstein fought the casting. He offered alternatives: Daniel Day-Lewis. Sean Penn. William Hurt. Tarantino held firm. His list of casting demands had been submitted alongside his other non-negotiable terms: final cut, a two-and-a-half-hour running time, and final choice of actors. Everything was approved — except Travolta. Tarantino met with Weinstein personally. The director would not budge.
Uma Thurman, the twenty-three-year-old who would play Mia Wallace, almost didn't do it either. "I wasn't sure I wanted to be in the movie," she later told Vanity Fair. It wasn't the obscenity, or her character's drug habit — it was the Gimp scene, the leather-clad figure who emerges from a cage, the bound-and-gagged male rape. "Pretty frightening," she said. "I was 23, from Massachusetts." Tarantino had to work to convince her. They had "very memorable, long discussions about male rape versus female rape." She signed on. The scene she was most nervous about, in the end, was the twist contest with Travolta. "Because I was so awkward and embarrassed and shy."
Travolta remembered the choreography: "Quentin recommended the Twist. And I said, 'Well, Little Johnny Travolta won the Twist contest when I was eight years old, so I know every version. But you may add other novelty dances that were very special in the day.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'There was the Batman, the Hitchhiker, the Swim, as well as the Twist.'"
Pulp Fiction opened on October 14, 1994, on a budget of less than $10 million. It had already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes months earlier — a fact that stunned the industry, given that the competition that year included Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors: Red and Zhang Yimou's To Live. The film earned more than $200 million worldwide, becoming the first independent film to cross that threshold. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. The soundtrack — an eclectic collision of surf music, soul, and a Neil Diamond cover — became a bestselling album.
The film remade the landscape. It revived Travolta's career. It made stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. It turned Miramax into a juggernaut. And it spawned a wave of imitators — Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, 2 Days in the Valley, Grosse Pointe Blank, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Go — none of which understood that the style they were copying was inseparable from the substance. In 2013, Pulp Fiction was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
The most influential film of the '90s, so well written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it — the noses of those zombie writers who take "screenwriting" classes that teach them the formulas for "hit films."
What the imitators missed — what nearly everyone missed, because the surface was so dazzling — was that Pulp Fiction was not, fundamentally, about style. It was about redemption. Jules Winnfield's decision to "walk the earth" after witnessing what he takes to be a miracle; Butch's refusal to abandon Marsellus Wallace to the horrors of the pawnshop basement, despite having every reason to run; even Vincent Vega's failure to achieve his own salvation, dying on the toilet because he couldn't put down a pulp novel at the right moment. The film's nonlinear structure wasn't a gimmick — it was a moral architecture, designed so that the chronological ending (Vincent's death) was concealed behind the narrative ending (Jules's redemption). You left the theater feeling hope, not despair, because Tarantino had restructured time itself to make grace the last word.
The Quiet One
After the thermonuclear success of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino did something no one expected. He waited.
Three years passed before Jackie Brown (1997), and when it arrived, it was an adaptation — his only one, based on Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch — transplanted from Florida to the South Bay neighborhoods where Tarantino had grown up. It starred Pam Grier, the queen of 1970s Blaxploitation, as a middle-aged flight attendant entangled with a small-time arms dealer played by Samuel L. Jackson. Robert De Niro appeared in a supporting role as a dimwitted ex-con — De Niro had wanted the role of Max Cherry, the bail bondsman, but Tarantino gave that to Robert Forster, a fellow Hollywood survivor whose career had faded, and whose weary dignity was exactly what the part demanded.
Jackie Brown was the anti-Pulp Fiction. Where Pulp Fiction exploded with structural pyrotechnics and quotable mayhem, Jackie Brown moved at the pace of middle age itself — slow, ruminative, suffused with the melancholy of people who had more behind them than in front. Its characters weren't cool; they were tired. The centerpiece wasn't a dance sequence or a hypodermic needle plunged into a heart — it was a scene in which Max Cherry watches Jackie walk through an airport to the Delfonics' "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" and falls in love without saying a word.
The film underperformed commercially relative to Pulp Fiction. Critics were divided. Some — correctly, as it turned out — recognized it as Tarantino's most mature work, the film in which he demonstrated that he could do more than rearrange genre furniture. Others called it a comedown. Tarantino, who had not bought a house after Pulp Fiction because he "didn't want to get stuck being an employee of my house," bought one after Jackie Brown. He would live there for decades, in the Hollywood Hills, with a movie theater built into one wing and a Planet of the Apes statue in the backyard.
Then he vanished. Six years elapsed between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. It was the longest gap of his career, and it produced the most extravagant pivot.
The Movie-Movie Universe
The idea for Kill Bill was cooked up during the production of Pulp Fiction itself, over beers with Uma Thurman. A riff on "Fox Force Five" — the fictional TV pilot Thurman's character Mia Wallace describes to Vincent Vega — mutated into something vast: a pregnant ex-assassin, shot in the head at her wedding rehearsal, waking from a coma to exact revenge on her former colleagues and the man who ordered the hit. "Based on the character of 'The Bride' created by Q & U," the credits would read.
Tarantino wrote a few pages, then put them in a drawer to focus on Jackie Brown and his long-gestating World War II epic, Inglourious Basterds. It was Thurman who reignited the project — they ran into each other at a party around 2000, and she reminded him of the vehicle he'd promised her. So he put Basterds aside.
The resulting screenplay ran over two hundred pages. It was, in Tarantino's own description, "the movie of my movie-geek dreams" — a genre-juggling collision of kung fu, Blaxploitation, spaghetti Western, horror, and anime, the cinematic equivalent of pulling every VHS tape from his "employee picks" shelf at Video Archives and shotgunning them over a single long night. The 155-day international shoot stretched from mid-2002 to mid-2003, budgets ballooned, and the running time approached four hours.
It was Harvey Weinstein — the Miramax cofounder who had financed the project — who suggested splitting it in two during a set visit. The logic was commercial: two movies could make twice the money from an already completed production. But the logic also served the material. Tarantino figured out the split within an hour, shot two separate opening credit sequences, and the result — Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) — grossed $330 million worldwide.
More than the money, Kill Bill marked the emergence of what Tarantino called his "movie-movie universe." His earlier films — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown — occupied a "real" universe, where movie conventions and reality collided. Kill Bill inhabited a parallel plane: the universe that characters in the real universe would go to see at the cinema. Conventions weren't subverted; they were fetishized. The violence was balletic, operatic, liberated from consequence. The blood was a geyser, not a stain.
It was a distinction that would structure the rest of his career. The real universe and the movie-movie universe — two registers, two modes of address, occupying the same filmography like parallel tracks of a single argument about what movies are for.
The History That Wasn't
Beginning with Inglourious Basterds in 2009, Tarantino discovered a new vocation: the rewriting of history.
The premise was inflammatory in the most literal sense. A squad of Jewish American soldiers, led by a part-Native American, heavily Southern-drawled lieutenant played by Brad Pitt, hunt and scalp Nazis in occupied France. The film's climax — in which Hitler himself is shot to death in a burning movie theater — was not merely a departure from the historical record but a willful annihilation of it. History was there "for the tweaking," as Anthony Lane observed in The New Yorker. Fire was the purifier.
Django Unchained (2012) extended the project to American slavery. A freed slave (Jamie Foxx), mentored by a German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter (Christoph Waltz, who had won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for Basterds), destroys a Mississippi plantation to rescue his wife. Tarantino won his second Academy Award for the screenplay. The film grossed over $425 million worldwide.
The critical response to both films was split along a revealing fault line. Many audiences revelled in the catharsis — the spectacle of the oppressed burning their oppressors, of history itself being forcibly rewritten to serve justice rather than truth. Others flinched. Spike Lee refused to see Django, calling it disrespectful to his ancestors. Historians noted that the film's depiction of enslaved people showed almost no collective resistance — only Django, acting alone, liberated by a white benefactor. "Not one word of social criticism that's been leveled my way has ever changed one word of a script or any story I tell," Tarantino told an interviewer. "I believe in what I'm doing wholeheartedly and passionately. It's my job to ignore that."
The statement revealed something essential. Tarantino's revisionist history was not political, not really — or rather, its politics were subordinate to its aesthetics. He was not making arguments about slavery or the Holocaust. He was making arguments about cinema: specifically, that cinema's power to emotionally resolve what reality cannot is not a betrayal of history but a fundamental capacity of the art form. The fairy tale is the point. "Once upon a time" is how it begins.
The Hateful Eight (2015) — a "claustrophobic snow Western" about eight strangers trapped in a haberdashery during a blizzard, shot on 65mm film with painstakingly restored 70mm projectors in a hundred hand-selected theaters — continued the post-Civil War exploration. And then came the culmination.
Once Upon a Time, for the Last Time
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) is a film about a car bowling along while a song cries out on the soundtrack. It is about the way Los Angeles keeps its ghosts around for a long, long time — poured into martini glasses at Musso & Frank, or rushing like a traveling breeze alongside the mosaic tiles of LAX's Terminal 3. It is about two men — a fading television actor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) — who are beginning to reckon with the ways their bodies and their industry are betraying them. And it is about Sharon Tate.
Tate, played by Margot Robbie with a luminous grace that borders on haunting, was the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, murdered on August 8, 1969, on Cielo Drive, along with three friends, by members of Charles Manson's family. Tarantino had been working on the film, in one way or another, for about seven years. The idea came to him sometime after Death Proof (2007). The final shot — a crane rising above Cielo Drive, lifting the audience out of the fantasy — had been in his head for five years before he filmed it.
He nearly abandoned the project. "I came close to abandoning this entire project because I didn't know if I wanted it in my life," he told TIME. "I put it aside. I questioned whether I wanted to let the Manson family into my head that much." What brought him back was Tate herself. She became the way in. "That literally is what happened," he said. "I think the reason I backed off before is, you don't know everything at the beginning."
The film, as Anthony Lane noted in The New Yorker, is essentially a fairy tale — the coy ellipsis in the title a reminder that "Once upon a time" is how fairy tales start. Tarantino may be on a mission to get every detail of 1969 exactly right — every billboard, every radio commercial ("Heaven Sent, by Helena Rubinstein"), every episode of Mannix — but he's also inviting the audience to "smoke a little wrongness." In Tarantino's version, the Manson killers do not murder Sharon Tate. They are diverted, by a chain of plausible accidents, to Rick Dalton's house next door, where Cliff Booth's dog and Cliff Booth's fists and Rick Dalton's flamethrower (a prop from a war movie Rick had once starred in) dispatch them in a burst of grotesque, cathartic, horrifying violence.
The audience Lane was sitting with laughed and clapped. He was freaked out. Not by the violence — by the reaction. "The jitters have become a joke," he wrote. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the laughter was itself the fairy tale's function: the impossible fantasy of a world in which Sharon Tate walks through her front door and invites her neighbor in for a drink, while the camera rises, and rises, and rises, and the real world reasserts itself above the rooftops, and you are left holding the double knowledge that this did not happen and that you wanted it to.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood grossed more than $370 million worldwide. It received ten Academy Award nominations. Pitt won Best Supporting Actor. And Tarantino, who had carried the final shot in his head for five years, who had built a film around the ghost of a woman whose career never was, who had said that this was "the big showstopping climax" of everything he'd made — Tarantino said it might be his last.
If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story and each film is like a train boxcar connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big showstopping climax of it all. And I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y.
The New Beverly and the Church of Celluloid
Long before Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood turned nostalgia into a narrative engine, Tarantino had been practicing a quieter form of preservation.
The New Beverly Cinema, nestled in L.A.'s Hasidic Fairfax district, a couple of tax brackets down from trendy hair salons, had been a vaudeville theater, a nightclub owned by mob legend Mickey Cohen, and a pornography house showing adult films in glorious 35mm. On May 5, 1978, Sherman Torgan reinvented it as the "New" Beverly Cinema and ran a Marlon Brando double feature of
A Streetcar Named Desire and
Last Tango in Paris. The double-bill format held for more than three decades. As revival houses across Los Angeles shuttered in the age of home video and the Criterion Collection, the New Beverly outlasted them all — an informal film school for aspiring auteurs, the kind of place where you could watch a Werner Herzog double bill and catch Herzog himself between films, waxing nihilistic about the terrifying chaos of a chicken's eye.
Tarantino was a regular. When he saw that Sherman had started showing Reservoir Dogs at midnight, he brought the entire cast down for an impromptu Q&A. When he needed Mélanie Laurent to inhabit her role as a projectionist in Inglourious Basterds, he brought her to the New Beverly's projection room to train on the classic 1940s Simplex-XL projector heads. Her final exam: running an entire midnight screening of Reservoir Dogs — previews, cartoons, and all — alone in the booth, unbeknownst to the audience. She aced it.
Then came the crisis. Sherman was losing money. The New Beverly was on the verge of closure. Tarantino "quietly cut monthly checks to cover the shortfall," as Vanity Fair reported, so the theater could stay open. "When I give, I like to give to something personal to me," he said. "I just couldn't live with myself if that theater shut down while I could do something about it."
Sherman died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2007 while bicycling. His son Mike took over, but the landlord was ready to sell the building. Tarantino bought it. He now owns the New Beverly Cinema outright, programs screenings, and insists — with the fervor of a man for whom the medium is the message — on projecting 35mm film prints. No digital. No compromise.
It's tempting to see the New Beverly as an eccentricity, a rich man's hobby. But it's more precisely understood as the physical manifestation of Tarantino's entire creative philosophy: that cinema is not content to be streamed, algorithms to be served, data to be optimized. It is an experience defined by its material conditions — the grain of the celluloid, the flicker of the projector, the ritual of the darkened room, the communal surrender to someone else's dream. The New Beverly is Video Archives made permanent.
The Man Who Plans to Leave
For a long time, Quentin Tarantino has spoken of his plan to walk away after ten features — and before sixty. He has now passed sixty. He has made nine films (he counts the two Kill Bill installments as one). The tenth — once announced as The Movie Critic, then abandoned, then replaced by something he's keeping quiet about — remains unfinished.
The retirement, if it comes, will be nearly unprecedented. As Richard Brody observed in The New Yorker, it is hard to think of notable directors who have ended their careers voluntarily. Douglas Sirk did it in 1959, simply because he "had had enough" of Hollywood. Far more common is commercial ostracism — the fate of Buster Keaton, D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Elaine May, all put out to pasture because their box-office returns were deemed inadequate. Tarantino, whose films remain commercially viable, whose name alone sells tickets, would be abandoning the field at the height of his powers.
His stated rationale is rooted less in dissatisfaction with the industry than in fear of his own decline. "Most directors' last films are fucking lousy," he has said. The retirement is, in some sense, a preemptive act of quality control — a refusal to let the inevitable entropy of age tarnish the body of work. Brody's analysis cuts deeper: "With his retirement, Tarantino burnishes his legacy; his worry about tarnishing his name with potentially weaker later films suggests something disturbingly funereal about his very approach to auteurship. It's as if his films, far from being (as he says) part of one story, are more like the stones of a crypt, posthumous works made in advance."
The comparison to Steven Soderbergh — who announced his own retirement in 2011, citing creative frustration and studio interference, then returned almost immediately via television, streaming, and iPhone filmmaking — illuminates the difference. Soderbergh is a process filmmaker; for him, cinema is everywhere, and it speaks through him no matter what he does. Tarantino is an event filmmaker; each film is a monument, a cathedral, an exclamation point. "For Tarantino," Brody wrote, "movies are an event, whereas for Soderbergh, they're an activity."
If push came to shove, Soderbergh, stuck in one room, would video that room with his phone and edit it into something. Tarantino wouldn't film at all. He would write.
And he has been writing. Prolifically, by his own account. He published a novelization of
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2021 — a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks, which is either not great or very good, depending on how much you like mass-market paperbacks. He published
Cinema Speculation, his first work of nonfiction, in 2022 — a deliriously entertaining collection of essays organized around key American films of the 1970s New Hollywood era, all of which he first saw as a child dragged to R-rated movies by his permissive mother. It is part memoir, part film history, part criticism, all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT's.
Kirkus called it "a top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist." It became an instant
New York Times bestseller.
He co-hosts a podcast, The Video Archives Podcast, with Roger Avary — the co-worker from Manhattan Beach, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction, the friend whose relationship with Tarantino has survived credit disputes and decades of divergent fortune. They sit together and discuss VHS tapes from the old collection, which Tarantino purchased when the store closed in 1994. It is the purest distillation of what Tarantino has always been: a man who cannot stop talking about movies, whose opinion is everything, who has built a career and a life and possibly a religion out of the conviction that cinema is the highest form of human expression and that anyone who disagrees simply hasn't seen enough of it.
He married Daniella Pick in 2018. He became a father. On a fan podcast called The Church of Tarantino, he recently admitted that making movies "just isn't as important to him as being a consistent presence in his children's lives right now." He has written a play he hopes to take to the West End. He has passed the script for The Adventures of Cliff Booth — a sequel to Once Upon a Time starring Brad Pitt, directed by David Fincher, produced for Netflix — demonstrating a possible future in which Tarantino writes but does not direct, in which the voice survives without the vision.
He still lives in the house he bought after Jackie Brown. The movie theater is still built into one wing. The Planet of the Apes statue still stands in the backyard. And somewhere in a room cluttered with memorabilia — a Charo! poster on the bathroom wall, muscle cars out front, a glittery view of the Valley's fading light — there are notebooks filled with atrocious handwriting, and in those notebooks, the tenth film. Or perhaps just the idea of one. The blank page, waiting.
The Cut That Resolved
In the final week of 2025, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — a four-and-a-half-hour version of the film Tarantino had first assembled in 2006 but never released to the public — opened on more than a thousand screens across North America. Twenty years after the two-volume release, after bootlegs and Cannes screenings and limited runs at Tarantino-owned theaters, the story of the Bride was at last told as one continuous narrative.
The changes were, in several cases, subtractions rather than additions — undoing alterations made to give the two-movie version more shape, restoring the original rhythm of revelation and withholding. A major twist, shifted to a cliffhanger at the end of Volume 1, was returned to its intended place in the final chapter. The anime sequence played uncut. The intermission fell where the split had once cleaved the film in two.
It was, in its way, a statement about how Tarantino sees his work: not as products delivered to market but as objects that exist in time, accruing meaning, awaiting their moment. The same film, twenty years later, becoming something new simply by being made whole. A man who plans to leave, putting his house in order. The Bride's unfinished business, finally finished. The video store clerk, still rewinding.
