Grindhouse

Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician who was born in Queens, New York, and Connie McHugh, a nurse. Tarantino’s father is Italian American and his mother is of Irish and Cherokee ancestry. He was raised by his mother, as his parents separated before his birth. When he was two years old, he moved to Torrance, California and later to the Harbor City neighborhood where he went to Fleming Junior High School in Lomita and took drama classes. He attended Narbonne High School in Harbor City for his freshman year before dropping out of school at age 15, to attend an acting class full time at the James Best Theater Company in Toluca Lake.

At age 22 he worked at the Video Archives, a now-defunct video rental store in Manhattan Beach where he and fellow movie enthusiasts, including Roger Avary, discussed cinema and customer video recommendations at length. He paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent and has cited that experience as inspiration for his directorial career. Tarantino has been quoted as saying, "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’

After Tarantino met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged him to write a screenplay. Tarantino directed and co-wrote a movie called My Best Friend’s Birthday in 1987. The final reel of the film was almost fully destroyed in a lab fire that occurred during editing but its screenplay would form the basis for True Romance. In January 1992, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was an immediate hit. The film garnered critical acclaim. Reservoir Dogs was a dialogue-driven heist movie that set the tone for his later films. Tarantino wrote the script in three and a half weeks and Bender forwarded it to director Monte Hellman. Hellman helped Tarantino to secure funding from Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment (which later became Artisan). Harvey Keitel read the script and also contributed to funding, taking a co-producer role, and a part in the movie.
Tarantino has had a number of collaborations with director Robert Rodriguez.

Tarantino’s screenplay True Romance was optioned and eventually released in 1993. The second script that Tarantino sold was Natural Born Killers, which was revised by Dave Veloz, Richard Rutowski and director Oliver Stone. Tarantino was given story credit, and wished the film well. Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black. He instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction. After Pulp Fiction was completed, he then directed Episode Four of Four Rooms, “The Man from Hollywood”, a tribute to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen. Four Rooms was a collaborative effort with filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez. The film was very poorly received by critics and audiences. He appeared in and wrote the script for Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn, which saw mixed reviews from the critics yet led to two sequels, for which Tarantino and Rodriguez would only serve as executive producers.

Tarantino’s third feature film was Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by Elmore Leonard. A homage to blaxploitation films, it starred Pam Grier, who starred in many of that genre’s films of the 1970s. He had then planned to make the war film provisionally titled Inglourious Bastards, but postponed it to write and direct Kill Bill (released as two films, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), a highly stylized “revenge flick” in the cinematic traditions of Wuxia (Chinese martial arts), Jidaigeki (Japanese period cinema), Spaghetti Westerns and Italian horror. It was based on a character (The Bride) and a plot that he and Kill Bill’s lead actress, Uma Thurman, had developed during the making of Pulp Fiction. In 2004, Tarantino returned to Cannes, where he served as President of the Jury. Kill Bill was not in competition, Kill Bill Vol. 2 had an evening screening, while it was also shown on the morning of the final day in its original 3-hour-plus version with Quentin himself attending the full screening. Tarantino then went on to be credited as “Special Guest Director” in Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 neo-noir film Sin City for his work directing the car sequence featuring Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro.

The next film project was Grindhouse, which he co-directed with Rodriguez. Released in theaters on April 6, 2007, Tarantino’s contribution to the Grindhouse project was titled Death Proof. It began as a take on 1970s slasher films, but evolved dramatically as the project unfolded. Ticket sales were low despite mostly positive reviews.

Among his current producing credits are the horror flick Hostel (which included numerous references to his own Pulp Fiction), the adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Killshot (for which Tarantino was credited as an executive producer although Tarantino was no longer associated with the film after its 2009 release.) and Hell Ride (written and directed by Larry Bishop, who appeared in Kill Bill Vol. 2).

Tarantino’s summer 2009 film Inglourious Basterds was the story of a group of guerrilla U.S. soldiers in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Filming began in October 2008. The film opened on August 21, 2009 to very positive reviews and the #1 spot at the box office worldwide. It went on to become Tarantino’s highest grossing film, both in the United States and worldwide.

In 2011, production began on Django Unchained, about the revenge of a slave in the U.S. South in 1858. The film stemmed from Tarantino’s desire to produce a spaghetti western set in America’s Deep South; Tarantino has called the proposed style “a southern”, stating that he wanted “to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to”. The film was released on December 25, 2012. —Wikipedia

The man behind some of the most innovative, creative, and visually inventive action films of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, director Robert Rodriguez is the epitome of the do-it-yourself attitude and a renaissance man of cinema. Directing, shooting, and editing nearly every one of his films, Rodriguez’s energetic and self-immersing approach to filmmaking has resulted in some of the most stylish and exciting action films in modern cinema.

Born June 20, 1968 into a large family that included ten siblings, Rodriguez was never lacking in inspiration due to the antics of his brothers and sisters and became fascinated with cartooning and filmmaking at an early age. Prompted to jump behind the camera after becoming enamored by John Carpenter’s Escape From New York at age 12, the fledgling director’s brothers and sisters served as a capable cast and crew, and with his father’s Super-8 camera in hand, Rodriguez took his first steps toward auteurhood. Shocked by the cost of developing films, the junior director showed early signs of budget-consciousness when he switched to video due to its versatility and the room it gave him to experiment. Awarded a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin soon after his graduation from St. Anthony’s High School, Rodriguez inked a popular comic-strip entitled Los Hooligans (inspired by the antics of his siblings) and continued to make films despite being rejected from the institution’s film school due to poor academic promise. Undaunted by the rejection, it was Rodriguez who would have the last laugh as his 16 mm film Bedhead won multiple awards and opened many doors. A humorous tale of a girl who gains psychic powers after receiving a bump on the head, the film’s unique humor stood out among the usually morose film-festival entries and charmed audiences and judges alike.

Also recognized by Columbia University for his skills as a comic writer and artist during this period, Rodriguez soon began setting his sights on making a feature-length film. Once again intimidated by the high cost of processing film, the resourceful director came up with one of the most unique forms of financing ever conceived by a filmmaker desperate for funding. Serving as a human guinea pig by subjecting himself to experimental drug studies, Rodriguez secured the 7,000 dollars he needed to get El Mariachi off the ground. With his good friend Carlos Gallardo serving as the hapless lead and a ragtag crew working round-the-clock in a Mexican border town, shooting was completed in 20 days for intended distribution in the Spanish video market. Bought by Columbia Pictures for distribution in the United States, El Mariachi was hailed for not only its unique style and energy, but also for the remarkably resourceful circumstances surrounding its creation as well. Brought in at the last minute to direct the made-for-cable feature Roadracers (1994) soon after, and helming “The Misbehavors,” arguably the most entertaining segment in the ill-received Four Rooms the following year, it wasn’t long before Hollywood was calling for a sequel to Rodriguez’s maiden effort. As much a remake as a sequel, though this time with the noted lead of Antonio Banderas (whom Rodriguez had worked with on “The Misbehavors”), Desperado displayed further indication of its director’s resourcefulness but failed to capture the core energy of the original. Re-teaming with his Four Rooms cohort Quentin Tarantino for the super-kinetic, schizophrenic crime/horror extravaganza From Dusk Till Dawn, the director continued to find his groove in the land of bloated budgets, and despite its dark humor and giddy energy, the film was criticized by many for not sticking to the conventions of a single genre. His follow-up, the subversive sci-fi teen romp The Faculty, was equally compelling, though lost in a sea of post-Scream (1996) self-conscious thrillers.

In subsequent years, Rodriguez would remain only slightly involved with the two straight-to-video From Dusk Till Dawn sequels, and many may have found it ironic that the director would receive his most substantial critical success yet with what was essentially a children’s film. A massive box-office hit that offered a family friendly adventure yarn served with a distinctively stylish and surreal twist, Spy Kids (2001) retained all the elements that had endeared Rodriguez to fans and critics, sans the graphic violence and adult elements that rendered his previous works unsuitable for the small fry. Alarmed by the fact that numerous kids had approached him and expressed their love of his very adult-oriented previous features, Rodriguez set out to craft an energetic adventure that called back to his more lighthearted early efforts. With its deliciously twisted Willy Wonka-inspired villain, bizarre set-pieces, high-tech gadgetry, and positive messages pertaining to the worth of a healthy self-image and the importance of family, Rodriguez won over a whole new generation of fans while simultaneously retaining his already solid and fiercely loyal fan base. Again turning out a stylish and flashy finished product on a remarkably tight budget (Rodriguez edited much of the film in his garage), the established director proved that his talent spanned numerous genres and his appeal was far reaching. Soon beginning work on a sequel to Spy Kids, Rodriguez also kept busy by beginning production on his longtime dream project, the epic final installment to his Mariachi trology, Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

In the wake of a visit with filmmaker and digital cinema advocate George Lucas, Rodriguez was soon convinced that the future of film lay not in celluliod but in digital video – and from Spy Kids 2 on the progressive-minded filmmaker would eschew tradition to shoot all of his future films on the versitile emerging format. Indeed Rodriguez’s subsequent digital films were as visually vibrant and aesthetically pleasing as ever, with Spy Kids 3 using the process to particularly pleasing effect in creating a fantasy world in which young protagonist Juni (Daryl Sabara) must journey into a living videogame to rescue his sister from a sinister foe known as The Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone in a particularly hammy performance).

If Once Upon a Time in Mexo – Rodriguez’s epic conclusion to the El Mariachi trilogy – failed to reach the delirious hights promised by it’s undeniably ambitious title in the eyes of some fans, the arrival of the visually striking and masterfully constructed Sin City in early 2005 proved without a doubt that Rodriguez was indeed still one of the most daring mainstream filmmakers in contemporary cinema. Despite the fact that Sin City author Frank Miller had made no secret of the fact that he had no desire to ever let the legacy of his notorious noir comic blighted by a sub-par film adaptation, Rodriguez secretly shot a scene showcasing his remarkably faithful vision for the film and offered it to Miller as a proposal for a feature length version of Sin City. Immediately recognizing the sincerity and respect with which Rodriguez had handled the source material—going so far as to use the panels of the graphic novel for storyboards—Miller agreed to let the director bring Sin City to life on the big screen and in turn, Rodriguez resigned from the Director’s Guild of America so that he could make Miller the official co-director of the film. When Sin City finally arrived in theaters in April of 2005, few fans of the comic could have realized what a faithful adaptation the film would be, and though it did draw some criticism for its stratospheric level of violence, longtime fans of Miller’s comic took to the film in droves and praised it for its unapologetic adherence to his dark vision.

Rodriguez finished off 2005 with another family adventure in the style of Spy Kids — although far less successful — called The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. He then spent 2006 teaming up with friend and colleague Quentin Tarantino to work on the over-the-top double-feature project Grindhouse. The film set out to follow in the tradition of the genre it was named after — bang for your buck drive-in/Times Square exploitationers — and the final product would include a movie by each director, as grindhouse theaters were known for screening double or triple features. While the grindhouse movies of the ’70s made up for the lack of starpower afforded by their shoestring budgets with intense violence, wild action sequences, and shocking premises, Rodruigez and Tarantino reveled in the chance to make a movie just as outlandish and campy, but with big budgets and major stars as well. Released with a maximum of fanfare by the Weinstein Company on Easter weekend, 2007, the film became one of the surprise flops of the spring, despite strong reviews from critics. —allmovie guide

Edgar Howard Wright (born 18 April 1974) is an English film and television director and writer. He is most famous for his work with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost on the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and TV series Spaced.

Wright was born in Poole, Dorset. He started directing his own films at the age of 14 when he was attending The Blue School, Wells, Somerset and working at the local tourist attraction Wookey Hole Caves. At the age of 20 he made a spoof western, A Fistful of Fingers, which was picked up for a limited theatrical release and broadcast on the British satellite TV channel Sky Movies. He then directed a number of television comedy programmes for the UK’s Paramount Comedy channel and the BBC, including Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes and Asylum, during the production of which he met writer-actors Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes.

In 1999 he joined Pegg and Hynes to create Spaced for Channel 4. Wright gave Spaced an unusual look for the sitcom genre, with dramatic camera angles and movement borrowed from the visual language of science fiction and horror films. Instead of shying away from these influences Wright makes an active effort to show his referencing, adding a ‘Homage-O-Meter’ to all of his releases, a device that displays each directorial nod he has made during shooting. In 2002, he made appearances as a scientist and a technician named Eddie Yorque during both series of Look Around You, a BBC programme created by a member of the Spaced cast, Peter Serafinowicz. He also made a brief appearance in Spaced, in which he can be seen, along with other crew members on the series, lying asleep in Daisy Steiner’s squat as she prepares to leave for her new house.

The critical success of Spaced paved the way for Wright and Pegg to move to the big screen with Shaun of the Dead, a zombie comedy which mixed a “Brit flick” romantic comedy style with homages to the horror classics of George A. Romero and Sam Raimi. The pair wrote a comedy action thriller, Hot Fuzz. Production started in March 2006 and the film was released in February 2007 in the UK and April 2007 in the US. It revolves around Pegg’s character, Nicholas Angel, a police officer who is transferred from London to rural Sandford, where grisly events soon take place. —wikipedia

Ask any horror filmmaker about the influences for their celluloid nightmares and chances are they’ll come back with something about their childhood fears and attempting to realize the things that scare them most. For Hostel and Cabin Fever director Eli Roth it has ultimately become a deeply disturbing mixture of the two. Roth’s proliferation in the horror genre coupled with his giddy willingness to play the role of cinema outlaw came at just the time the PG-13 blues were leading many genre aficionados to wonder if there really were anymore filmmakers out there who were still willing to break the rules.

As a young horror fanatic, the future New York Film School graduate obsessed over keeping pace with the career trajectory of Evil Dead director Sam Raimi. With a target of 21 as the age by which he should direct his first feature, the ambitious 20-year-old sat down to write a script based on a series of frightening medical incidents that happened to him in his youth. Paralyzed at 12 by a rare virus that strikes one in a million, stricken with a water-borne parasite for which he had to drink poison to stop from eating his insides at 17, and infected with a bacteria that literally caused his skin to peel from his face at 19, Roth adapted the ailments that plagued him into a script for the alternately funny and frighteningly repulsive Cabin Fever in 1995 along with a little help from friend Randy Pearlstein. An independent homage to the 1970s and ‘80s shockers on which Roth was weaned, Cabin Fever was shot for a paltry 1.5 million dollars in the same North Carolina woods in which his childhood idol had filmed The Evil Dead and went on to spark an unprecedented bidding war when it premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. When Lion’s Gate released Cabin Fever into theaters the following year, Roth was immediately hailed by many horror fans as the true future of the genre. Though some were turned off to the humorous approach that Roth had taken to terror, the more grotesque aspects of Roth’s bacterial skin-crawler hinted at a filmmaker not afraid to break from genre convention and play dirty in order to keep his audience squirming in their seats. Of course when your first film creates as big a buzz as Cabin Fever did, what’s a filmmaker supposed to do for a follow-up? Armed with the knowledge that his sophomore effort could either make him or break him in the eyes of the horror community, Roth pondered a Cabin Fever sequel and pored through studio scripts in an effort to find the idea that truly terrified him. As fate would have it, friend and fellow film fanatic Harry Knowles of the popular movie website “Ain’t it Cool News” contacted Roth just around this time with a story concerning a website that had been brought to his attention where, for a nominal fee, anyone wishing to experience death firsthand could personally murder another human being; the resulting profit generally going to the unfortunate participant’s impoverished family. The groundwork for Hostel had been laid.

Frustrated by the American film machine and encouraged by like-minded horror fan Quentin Tarantino to press forward with the idea at all costs, Roth locked himself away to pound out the screenplay for the brutally unforgiving Hostel while still thriving on the energy of the Red Sox win at the 2004 World Series. Filmed in Prague for under five million dollars as a way for Roth to visit a place he had always loved (and deliver a notable kiss-off to American unions), Hostel told the tale of two hard-partying American backpackers and their horny Icelandic friend who, while backpacking through Europe, all fall into a grim trap after being lured to a small Slovakian town with the promise of plentiful drugs and beautiful women. By largely abandoning the humor of Cabin Fever to set a more ominous and menacing tone and not allowing his camera to flinch during some of the film’s more sanguine moments, Roth proved with Hostel that he could stand alongside such genre innovators as Takashi Miike to effectively test the limits of even the most desensitized genre fan. A financial success at the box office in addition to being one of the few horror films released at the time that wasn’t a sequel or a remake, Hostel truly delivered on the promises made in Cabin Fever to prove that Roth’s initial success was indeed no fluke. Outside of his feature directorial work, Roth has also teamed with filmmakers Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel to form Raw Nerve, an exclusively horror-oriented production company dedicated to producing truly boundary-pushing genre films that never compromise the filmmaker’s vision. Roth’s hilariously obscene, foul-mouthed produce-howler The Rotten Fruit proved that the playful director was even fairly adept at stop-motion animation.

Of course, American horror pictures — particularly those crafted by intelligent and intuitive directors (and Roth fits the bill on both counts) — tend to rake in unholy profits at the box office, and Hostel was no exception. It grossed almost 20 million (from a 4.6-million-dollar budget) in its opening weekend alone, paving the way, of course, for a sequel, that picks up directly following the final shot of the original. 2007’s Hostel: Part II reprised the formula of the first film, substituting an ensemble of girls for the boys of the original picture. This film follows several backpackers, visiting Rome, who discover that the torture palace from the original Hostel is actually a small part of an international “chain,” and find themselves subjected to endless sadism and brutality.

Alongside that sequel, Roth juggled an overwhelmingly busy schedule. He assumed production duties on the 2006 big-screen adaptation of television’s Baywatch, and helmed the same year’s throwback teen sex comedy Scavenger Hunt, a madcap farce that sends a bunch of crazy adolescents on a wild goose chase for a bevy of diverse objects. Dimension Pictures and The Weinstein company also slated Roth to write and direct the Stephen King adaptation Cell immediately after he wrapped with Hostel 2. That picture weaves the tale of a signal simultaneously emitted by all of the cellular phones in the world, which turns the users into ravenous zombies. Meanwhile, Roth (who had contributed bit parts to films for years) also joined the cast of Grind House (2007), an attempt by his mentors, co-directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to resuscitate the multi-episode horror picture. —allmovie guide

Gleefully anarchic, the long-haired heavy metal rocker-cum-slasher-film-director Rob Zombie sustains an instantly recognizable image on par with his musical contemporaries (and friends), Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. Long fascinated by Charles Manson, gore films, and the occult, Zombie exudes a dark sensibility that has earned him mainstream success as well as a certain cult following in the film world. Founder of the band White Zombie, the rocker made his name behind the camera not only by directing his group’s music videos, but by designing the surreal “head trip” animated sequence in Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996). His first feature outing came in 2003, with the controversial House of 1000 Corpses, a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre update, overloaded with buckets of gore, packed with references to ‘70s and ’80s horror staples, and starring no less than Karen Black. Universal rejected the picture, certain of an NC-17 rating, but Zombie refused to make cuts and still emerged with an R. House drew critical pans but purportedly (and unsurprisingly) earned almost twice its small budget. His follow-up, 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects, did well critically (Roger Ebert commented, “The movie is not merely disgusting, but has an attitude and a subversive sense of humor,”) but disappointed studio heads, earning only slightly more than its production costs even as it thrilled genre loyalists. Later he went on to helm the troubled remake of John Carpenter’s seminal slasher pic, Halloween. The production did not find an audience and was considered a step down for the filmmaker. —allmovie guide