The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin Tarantino

For a film, explained a young Quentin Taran­ti­no in one inter­view, “the real test of time isn’t the Fri­day that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thir­ty years from now.” It just so hap­pens that Pulp Fic­tion, which made Taran­ti­no the most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor in Amer­i­ca prac­ti­cal­ly on its open­ing day, came out thir­ty years ago last fall. That pro­vid­ed the occa­sion for the video essay from YouTu­ber Dod­ford above, which tells the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no became a film­mak­er, assem­bled for the most part out of Taran­ti­no’s own words — and in the not-quite-lin­ear chronol­o­gy with which peo­ple still asso­ciate him.

As Taran­ti­no’s body of work has grown, it’s come to seem less defined by such sliced-and-diced time­lines, or even by the obses­sions with pop cul­ture or graph­ic vio­lence the media tend­ed to exag­ger­ate when first he rose to fame. “They thought it was far more vio­lent than it was,” he says of the pub­lic reac­tion to his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in a Char­lie Rose inter­view from which this video draws. He could take that as a tes­ta­ment to his under­stand­ing of cin­e­ma, a form that draws its pow­er just as often from what it does­n’t show as what it does.

Taran­ti­no began cul­ti­vat­ing that under­stand­ing ear­ly, through­out his movie-sat­u­rat­ed child­hood and his stint as a video-store clerk in Man­hat­tan Beach. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, how­ev­er, Video Archives did­n’t make him a movie expert: “I was already a movie expert; that’s how I got hired.” It was dur­ing that peri­od that he com­menced work on My Best Friend’s Birth­day, which he meant to be his first film. Though he nev­er com­plet­ed it even after three years of work, he did notice the artis­tic devel­op­ment evi­dent in a com­par­i­son between its ama­teur­ish ear­ly scenes and its more effec­tive lat­er ones.

That failed project turned out to be “the best film school a per­son could pos­si­bly have,” and it pre­pared him to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ties that would come lat­er. After writ­ing and sell­ing the script for True Romance, he was in a posi­tion to work on Reser­voir Dogs, which even­tu­al­ly made it to pro­duc­tion thanks to the inter­est of Har­vey Kei­t­el, who would play Mr. White. When that pic­ture got atten­tion at Sun­dance and became an indie hit, Taran­ti­no went off on a Euro­pean sojourn, osten­si­bly in order to work on his next script — and to fig­ure out how to beat “the dread­ed sopho­more curse,” some­thing with which he’d had much sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence as a dis­ap­point­ed movie­go­er.

The fruit of those labors, a crime-sto­ry anthol­o­gy called Pulp Fic­tion, first seemed, incred­i­bly, to promise lit­tle box-office poten­tial. But one sens­es that Taran­ti­no knew exact­ly what he had, because he knew his audi­ence. It’s not that he’d com­mis­sioned inten­sive mar­ket research, but that, as he once put it, “It’s me; I’m the audi­ence.” And so he’s remained over the past three decades, draw­ing ever clos­er to com­plet­ing what, as he’s often said, will ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute a ten-pic­ture fil­mog­ra­phy. Actu­al­ly stop­ping there would, of course, risk the dis­ap­point­ment of his many fans, who only want more. But when a film­mak­er keeps at it too long, as the cinephile in Taran­ti­no well under­stands, he runs the far more dire risk of dis­ap­point­ing him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Quentin Taran­ti­no & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Clas­sic Movies on Their New Video Archives Pod­cast

Why Quentin Taran­ti­no Will Only Make 10 Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.