Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and moved with his mother, Connie McHugh, to the Los Angeles area as a young child. He dropped out of high school in his mid-teens and worked for several years at Video Archives, a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California, where his encyclopedic self-taught film knowledge began to take shape.

Tarantino wrote and directed Reservoir Dogs (1992) on a modest budget, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and quickly became a cult favorite. He also sold early screenplays, including True Romance and Natural Born Killers, which were directed by others. His breakthrough came with Pulp Fiction (1994), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, grossing over $200 million worldwide on an approximately $8 million budget and establishing him as one of the defining directors of the 1990s.

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Tarantino went on to direct Jackie Brown (1997), the two-part Kill Bill (2003-2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012, which won him a second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a major critical and commercial hit that earned Brad Pitt an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Tarantino has long stated an intention to retire after directing ten feature films; a planned tenth film, The Movie Critic, was announced and later shelved in 2023, leaving his final directorial project uncertain as of this writing. Throughout his career he has also worked extensively as a screenwriter and producer on other filmmakers’ projects, and has occasionally acted in supporting roles, including appearances in his own films and others such as Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn.

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Tarantino’s income is driven by a combination of director and writer fees, profit participation on his films, and, more recently, book royalties. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood grossed roughly $374 million worldwide on a budget in the $90-100 million range, a result that industry reporting indicates delivered him a substantial profit-participation payday on top of his upfront fee. Given the relatively modest budgets of most of his films relative to their box office returns, Tarantino has long been considered one of the more efficient, high-margin filmmakers working at his level of fame.

Tarantino has negotiated some of the richest writer-director deals in the industry across his career, reportedly including significant backend profit points on several of his films with longtime studio partners. His two published books, the novelization Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021) and the film-criticism collection Cinema Speculation (2022), both became bestsellers, adding a new and growing revenue stream in recent years.

Tarantino has kept a comparatively low profile in commercial endorsements relative to actors of similar fame, with his public income concentrated almost entirely in filmmaking, screenwriting, and publishing rather than brand partnerships.

In 2007, Tarantino purchased the New Beverly Cinema, a historic revival movie theater in Los Angeles, which he personally curates and has kept running as a nonprofit-style repertory house dedicated to screening films on 35mm and 16mm prints. He also operates the production company A Band Apart, through which several of his films have been made.

Tarantino owns homes in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles as well as in Tel Aviv, Israel, where his wife, Israeli singer Daniella Pick, is from, and where the family spends significant time.