Quentin Tarantino

The career of Quentin Tarantino instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, thanks to winning an Oscar, Golden Globe and numerous critics' awards for Best Original Screenplay for the groundbreaking and much-imitated "Pulp Fiction" (1994). Having famously learned his art while working as a video store clerk after dropping out of high school, Tarantino burst onto the scene first as a writer, penning the original drafts of Tony Scott's "True Romance" (1993) and Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" (1994). Prior to that, he was a cause célèbre at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with his breakout heist-gone-wrong thriller "Reservoir Dogs" (1992). But it was "Pulp Fiction" that caught the attention of Hollywood, with the entertainment press selecting him - for better or worse - as the symbol of a new generation of hot, young directors. Tarantino followed up with the critically hailed "Jackie Brown" (1997), an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, and the epic martial arts flicks "Kill Bill vol. 1" (2003) and "Kill Bill vol. 2" (2004). After helming the "Death Proof" featurette in "Grind House" (2007), his gory collaboration with friend Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino returned to his Oscar-caliber ways with World War II fantasia "Inglorious Basterds" (2009), revenge epic "Django Unchained" (2012) and ultraviolent western "The Hateful Eight" (2015). Regardless of what his harshest critics might have said, Tarantino remained a true auteur able to make his own films in an otherwise restrictive Hollywood system.