Quentin Tarantino

“Royale with cheese.” Three words that helped rede ne movie dialogue when they were rst uttered by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino’s classic action thriller turns 20 this month, and without the writer and director’s slice of ‘ rock ’ n’ roll spaghetti western’, modern day cinema would be a different, and undoubtedly more boring, place. Pulp Fiction is one of the seminal lms of the 1990s and regularly charts high in critics’ lists of the top 100 movies of all time. It made writer and director Tarantino one of the most sought- after, not to mention controversial, talents of the past 20 years. Not bad for a lad born in Knoxville, Tennessee, whose rst job was working in a video store. “When people ask me if I went to lm school, I tell them, ‘ No, I went to lms,’” he once said. Pulp Fiction’s one of 11 movies he’s directed but its ground- breaking dialogue, uncompromising violence and brilliant storytelling make it still his standout piece of work. No other director could mess about with a lm’s chronology like Tarantino does and get away with it ( it ends with Bruce Willis’ Butch riding away on a motorbike – it’s the same noise that opens the lm). While his later work hasn’t always been met with the same critical adulation, he is still one of the few directors to take chances, and puts thought and passion into every single frame. As a result, he’s created a movie world where everything is connected. When Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace is talking about her fteen minutes of fame in a show called Fox Force Five, little did audiences know that those ve female assassins would feature in Kill Bill some ten years later. Travolta’s Vincent Vega has a brother, the ear slicing Vic Vega from Tarantino’s earlier seminal hit Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction cost 8 million to produce and went on to make more than 100 million at the US box of ce alone, and proved that clever dialogue, plus a storyline that made audiences use their brains, beat mindless CGI and explosions every single time. Tarantino represents cinema in its purist form: where the story will always be the crucial factor.