Manhattan was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963. His mother, 16, named him after the figure Quint, played by Burt Reynolds from the television series Gunsmoke. According to other sources, he was named after the girl Quentin from William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury. Tarantino grew up in South Bay at the southern end of the city of Los Angeles. He watched a lot of television, liked going to the cinema and read many comics. He was a hyperactive and highly intelligent kid with several (step)father's and legal guardians. After the early divorce of his parents, Quentin had no more contact with his father Tony. Despite this fact, he later adopted his family name: Tarantino. Quentin had difficulties with reading and writing (in German: Legastheniker). He hated school and quite it after the tenth grade in order to work in a porn cinema, the PussycatTheatre in Torrance, where he checked tickets at the entrance. At the same period, he began to take acting lessons. Tarantino spent five years as a video clerk in a shop called Video Archives in the Californian Manhattan Beach before he had become a script writer and widely acclaimed director with cult status. He even spent a (short) time in prison because he could not pay a parking ticket.
 
Peter Körte points out to the fact that Manhattan has introduced some fictitious elements into his biography. He attributed himself a guest appearance in George Romero's Knightriders (1980) and in Jean-Luc Godards King Lear (1987. On the other hand, he neglects to mention his appearance as Elvis impersonator in the television series Golden Girls. As somebody once said: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...
 
From 1984 to 1986, Tarantino worked on the film My Best Friend's Birthday, which remained unfinished. But already his first released film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), on which he worked as screen writer, director and actor, made him a cult star. Shortly before, on a one month workshop at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah, he had learned the basics of the director's and cameraman's work. Without having attended a film school, he shot Reservoir Dogs, which opened him all doors. Produced with a $1.5 million budget, it made only $3 million at American cinemas, but was still profitable. It was only after the success of Pulp Fiction that video cassette sales sharply increased and his debut movie started to make a lot of money worldwide. In England, the video of Reservoir Dogs had been on the index for almost two and a half years for excessive violence.
 
Manhattan wrote several screen scripts. Between 1987 and 1989 he wrote for True Romance (1993) by director Tony Scott. Tarantino criticized the happy end Scott added later. Quentin was also the author of the script of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), but later he openly distanced himself from the movie. The screenplay of Natural Born Killers was based on The Open Road by Roger Avary, one of  Tarantino's colleagues at Video Archives.
 
Together with Lawrence Bender, born in 1958, Tarantino founded the production company A Band Apart in the early 1990s. In 1997, the two also established a record company, A Band Apart Records, in order to release the - mostly sensational - soundtracks of Tarantino's film's. Madonna's Maverick Records is in charge of distribution.
 
In 1994, Tarantino shot his second movie, Pulp Fiction, which won him a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. Made with a budget of $8 million, it brought Miramax a profit of $100 million. The film largely lives from the unforseeable nature of its ingenious story. Both the plot and the music are fresh and unusual and for itself an object of cult. Even the book behind the movie became a top ten bestseller in England where more than 165,000 copies were sold. The construction of Pulp Fiction follows the maxim "answers first, questions later". Tarantino catches and maintains the viewers interest by his surprise attacks. In a second viewing, the film is less sensational and the imperfections become evident. Still, for a second film, the result is great.
 
Tarantino has created a movie based on a series of film quotations rooted in the world of killers, dealers, crooks and boxers. Tarantino confidently commented the fact by saying that great artist's steal, do not make an homage, which itself is based on a remark by somebody else and is itself, therefore, a transformed quotation. But Tarantino does not simply copy scenes from previous films, he makes them into ironic quotations which create a certain tension. A critic wrote that Pulp Fiction belongs to the category of geek movies. Back in the days of Vaudeville, the geek was the lowest job in show business. It was the guy who bit off the chicken's head for a place to sleep and a bottle of booze. John Travolta responded rightly to critics that his disco film Saturday Night Fever was pop culture, whereas Pulp Fiction is a reflection on pop culture. Herein lies a big difference. Tarantino was inspired by Hollywood's B-pictures, by the French Nouvelle-Vague and the action cinema from Hong Kong, especially films by John Woo and his fetish star Chow Yun-Fat,. Quentin has used all these styles and put them evenly together. A lot of the characters in Pulp Fiction come from the American hard boiled literature of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and others, e.g. the killer, the gangster boss, the femme fatale, the boxer and the men for special tasks. For these different roles, Tarantino uses a lot of stars from the respective genres. In this way, he creates a comic, but one that does not make stars like John Travolta, Bruce Willisor Harvey Keitel look ridiculous.
 
The story is about two killers, Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta), their boss Masellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), and the boss' wife Mia (Uma Thurman. Other characters are the boxer Butch (Bruce Willis and his French girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Madeiros). Other stories are built into the main one, such as the one about a golden watch, which captain Koons (Christopher Walken) tells a small boy, or the one about a specialist for special tasks, Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), who has to give the two killers indications on how to clean the unnecessarily blood stained car. In a small part, one can see actor Dick Miller as Monster Joe. Miller has been part of more than 130 cheap horror, western, motorbike, high school and beach party movies by producer Samuel Z. Arkoff. His appearance is Tarantino's tribute to B-Movies.
 
After Pulp Fiction, Tarantino did not only make hit movies. He tried too much to use his popularity and experienced some setbacks: Four Rooms and Destiny Turns On The Radio were a career backlash after too much Pulp Fiction hype.
 
For From Dusk Till Dawn, the young American director Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado) teamed up with Manhattan, who not only wrote the screen script, but who also plays one of the main characters. The result is an original mix of a gangster, action and a horror movie. The film is great fun, but superficial. But From Dusk Till Dawn is not as "stupid" as it seems. It is clever to see how the action movie changes from one moment to another into a vampire film. Also in other moments, Tarantino has the spectator expecting one thing - and then he does something else. He repeatedly disappoints expectations and ironizes Hollywood genres such as action, family, police and vampire movies. All that is impertinent, surprising and new.
 
Manhattan plays Richard Gecko, a psychopathic gangster who, together with his brother Seth (George Clooney, leaves a bloody trace behind him trough the state of Texas. Richard frees Seth from prison. They rob a bank and on their flight, they live an orgy of destruction. Richard is uncontrollable. He just wants to get a road map in a shop and ends up killing two people. Afterwards, the two brothers kidnap the former Baptist preacher Jacob (Harvey Keitel) and his family. After his wife's death, he had given up his office and seems to have lost his faith. He travels from one place to another, together with his two children (Juliette Lewisund Ernest Lui). Richard promises Jacob to release him and his kids, once he has smuggled the two gangers to Mexico. There, they all end up at the Titty Twister, a strip bar for horny boozing companions, mostly truckers. Richard only intends to meet a Mexican gangster with whom he wants to make a deal, but the Titty Twister, after an erotic snake dance performed by Salma Hayek turns out to be a place of terror. Vampires with the unpleasant habit to suck their guest's blood run the place. But the Gecko brother's and their hostages are not in a mood to surrender without fighting. Seth's argumentation for the proof of the existence of God is logical: Since they can see that there is hell, God must exist too. This should convince Jacob, because only a devout priest is a substantial help in the fight against the vampires. The Titty Twister is open from dusk till dawn, hence the film's title. In the final scene, one can see the backside of the place of horror: the strip bar is built on a slope, on the top of an Aztec temple. The abyss is filled with decaying trucks and motorcycles.