45 interesting facts about Quentin Tarantino! (List)

You can read them in the list below!

1. He has Italian, Irish and Cherokee ancestry.

2. His middle name is Jerome.

3. Tarantino had planned a movie starring Michael Madsen and John Travolta as a prequel to both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction called Double V Vega.

4. Kill Bill was Quentin Tarantino’s first feature-length film to have fewer than 100 instances of the word “f*ck.”

5. All of the clocks in the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20.

6. He dropped out of school at the age of 16 to train to act at James Best Theatre Company. However, he became bored of this after two years and dropped out.

7. Tarantino co-wrote and directed a movie called My Best Friend’s Birthday in 1987, but the film reels were almost fully destroyed in a fire. The screenplay went on to provide the basis for True Romance (1993).

8. He was an employee of video rental store Video Archives. Tarantino would observe what people would like to watch and has claimed this influenced his directorial choices.

9. Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington’s characters in Django Unchained are intended to be descendants of John Shaft from the Shaft films, which would explain Washington’s character’s name: Broomhilda Von Schaft.

10. While filming Django Unchained, Leonardo DiCaprio had to stop filming at one point as he struggled using so many racial slurs.

11. In Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules, has a “Bad Mother F**ker” wallet that belongs to Tarantino in real life.

12. Daryl Hannah’s Kill Bill character, Elle Driver, has the code name “California Mountain Kingsnake.” In fact, hers is the only Deadly Viper Assassination Squad code name that isn’t a venomous snake. The name is fitting since she also isn’t able to poison The Bride when she’s in the hospital because Bill calls her before she can.

13. Although it’s long been acknowledged that Tarantino’s formative years were largely spent working in a video rental store called Video Archives, in Hermosa Beach, he only got that job when he was twenty two. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Tarantino recounts that his first jobs were in fact tied to the adult entertainment industry.
At the age of sixteen, he would drive around all night with the owner of a porno magazine title, collecting quarters from the magazine racks. I suppose it would have been fun if you were a a) an insomniac, or b) a connoisseur of ‘the carnal arts’, but Tarantino is neither. As he would say to Rose whilst describing his second job in adult entertainment, as an usher at the Pussycat Theatre in Torrance, California:“You get to go to a movie theatre all day long, and then you get to see all the movies for free. All right, well, irony of ironies, I end up getting a job at a movie theatre that [sic] I couldn’t care less about the movies and was totally bored by them.”

14. Inglourious Basterds star Eli Roth has claimed he was able to get into the mindset of the violent “Bear Jew” character because of the costumes. He’s admitted that “wool underwear will make you want to kill anything” and also the music of Hannah Montana, which his girlfriend added to his iPod. It somehow filled him with the rage he needed to wield his baseball bat.

15. Tarantino has said that he writes two types of script: “Movie Movie” and “Realer than Real World”. He suggests that those who reside within the “Realer than Real World” ‘universe’ would want to watch those in the “Movie Movie” ‘universe’. He has suggested that those films under the “Movie Movie” genre are unrealistic, while the likes of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs can be categorised under “Realer than Real World”.

16. The iconic dance scene featuring Uma Thurman and John Travolta at Jack Rabbit Slim’s is copied as an homage to Federico Fellini’s 8½.

17. At the very beginning of Kill Bill‘s O-Ren Ishii fight scene, Lucy Liu, in Japanese, says, “I hope you’ve saved your energy. If you haven’t, you may not last 5 minutes.” It is then exactly 4 minutes and 59 seconds until the fatal blow of the scene.

18. One of the names carved into the bat carried by The Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds is Anne Frank.

19. Quentin Tarantino wrote the part of Jules in Pulp Fiction specifically for Samuel L. Jackson after seeing him audition for Reservoir Dogs. Jackson had auditioned for the role of the man who trains Mr. Orange, but the part eventually went to Randy Brooks.

20. We’ll never find out why Inglourious Basterds is spelled the way it is.

21. Initially, Tarantino couldn’t decide which character he wanted to play in Pulp Fiction. He was between Jimmie and Lance, but opted for Jimmie once he realized he wanted to be behind the camera during Mia’s overdose.

22. He regularly drives around his home town of Malibu in the ‘Pussy Wagon’ from Kill Bill.

23. Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained are the first two parts of a movie trilogy based on revenge, with the third movie rumoured to be called Black Crow.

24. Tarantino has said, “Here’s the thing. I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.”

25. Tarantino wrote Inglourious Basterds inbetween writing Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill films.

26. After watching Reservoir Dogs, Madonna, who was the subject of the opening dialogue, sent Tarantino a copy of her Erotica album with the message “To Quentin. It’s not about dick, it’s about love. Madonna.”

27. When Calvin Candie smashes his hand down on the dinner table in Django Unchained, actor Leonardo DiCaprio really broke a glass under his hand and began to bleed. He stayed in character, however, and continued with the scene, eventually smearing his blood all over Kerry Washington’s face. When the scene ended, Leo received a standing ovation from everyone on set, and this was the take that ended up in the final cut.

28. He has claimed he likes to leave 20% of the movie ‘unseen’ (for example, not showing you what is in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction) “so the movie is really yours”.

29. Uma Thurman initially rejected the role of Mia Wallace. In order to get her to sign on to Pulp Fiction, a desperate Tarantino read her the script over the phone and convinced her. It was during the filming of the 1994 classic that the pair began to develop the concept of Kill Bill. Uma was given the script, along with the offer for the role of “The Bride,” as a 30th birthday present from Tarantino.

30. He played an Elvis impersonator in the comedy show The Golden Girls.

31. Due to his hatred of racism, he has claimed Calvin Candie, the central villain in Django Unchained played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is the only character he’s written that he’s hated. He’s said: “I hated Candie and I normally like my villains no matter how bad they are. I can see their point of view. I could see his point of view, but I hated it so much. For the first time as a writer, I just f*cking hated this guy.”

32. Tarantino claims that he was simply bored by school, and so dropped out to devote his life to movies. Of all the criticisms levelled at Tarantino over the years, (and there’s been a few), nobody can deny that the man is smart. Like many of the writers on this site, Tarantino would be classified as an autodidact – an autodidact is somebody who possesses a prodigious and expansive self-taught knowledge about certain subjects and/or phenomena. Tarantino had a passing interest in History and English in school, only because History was closely linked to the historical epics that he liked to watch in the theatre, and English naturally sharpened his skills in scriptwriting. Although he has flirted with the idea of being a novelist in the past, Tarantino’s first love has always been movies. He swapped the classroom for the cinema and never looked back.

33. Tarantino was thanked in Nirvana’s In Utero, though his name was spelt differently. In turn, Tarantino thanked Nirvana on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and add included ‘RIP Kurt’.

34. After getting into a fight with a taxi driver who had insulted his then girlfriend, Tarantino nearly lost his nipple. He said in an interview: “He took a big bite out of me, right by my nipple…The only reason her didn’t really f*ck me up was he was too greedy. He took too big a bite. Had he taken a smaller bite, I might not have a nipple now.”

35. He famously dislikes brand placements in films and creates imaginary brands to replace them in his own. These include the infamous Kahuna burger, as well as Red Apple Cigarettes, G.O. Juice, Jack Rabbit Slims and Teriyaki Donuts.

36. His friend Robert Rodriguez scored the soundtrack for Kill Bill for $1. In return, Tarantino directed a scene in Rodriguez’s film Sin City for the same fee.

37. The suit bought in Jackie Brown is the same as the one worn by Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction.

38. He is now reportedly worth $90million, but before he became rich he was so poor he couldn’t pay his parking tickets, so served time in jail instead. He said: “I was actually in jail three different times for tickets. I was picking up some dialogue, but I wasn’t in there for that. It was easier when you’re broke to do the time.”

39. He has an IQ of 160.

40. Over 450 gallons on fake blood were used in the two Kill Bill films.

41. Leonardo DiCaprio requested the role of Calvin Candie in Django Unchained and Tarantino re-wrote the character to become younger to accommodate the actor. He said in an interview: “He got [the script] and really liked Calvin Candie. Leo was younger than I had initially written, but I read it again and could see no reason why the character couldn’t be younger. And since I’m hitting hard this notion of the American South re-creating European aristocracy in this amateur make-it-up-as-you-go-along fashion, the nothing of him as the boy emperor was cool.”

42. Tarantino was offered the job of directing Men in Black, but decided to turn it down.

43. He has more acting credits than directing ones.

44. He enjoys the James Bond films and has said that he would like to direct one at some point.

45. He is 6ft 1inch tall.