Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino quit school at seventeen, with his mother's permission, to take acting classes full time, then gave up acting on the grounds that he admired directors more. He worked in a video rental shop, paid close attention to what people actually took home, and has cited that as the education. Reservoir Dogs appeared in 1992 out of more or less nowhere, and Pulp Fiction took the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for its screenplay two years later.

The signature is easy to describe and nearly impossible to copy: long conversations about nothing that turn out to be about the danger in the room, chronology cut apart and reassembled, violence that arrives fast and is not stylish at all once it starts. What the imitators miss is patience. The opening of Inglourious Basterds is twenty minutes of a man being polite to a farmer, and every cut in it is built to make an audience count the seconds.

Later he became a revisionist, using genre grammar to rewrite history so it comes out differently: occupied France in Inglourious Basterds, American slavery in Django Unchained, which won him a second screenplay Oscar, and 1969 Los Angeles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He acts in his own films, usually badly, and has spent decades insisting he will stop at ten. His work has collectively grossed more than $1.9 billion, which for a director with no franchise and no superhero is a statement in itself, and it has brought two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and four Golden Globes.