Grindhouse: Death Proof

Director/screenwriter/actor/producer Quentin Tarantino was perhaps the most distinctive and volatile talent to emerge in American film in the early ‘90s, who learned his craft first as a video clerk and then as an actor. During his time at Video Archives, the fledgling filmmaker began writing screenplays, completing his first, True Romance, in 1987. After years of negotiations, he decided to sell the script to the director Tony Scott. During this time, Tarantino wrote the screenplay for Natural Born Killers, and gave the script to his partner, Rand Vossler. Tarantino then with the money from True Romance, he begin pre-production on Reservoir Dogs. Word-of-mouth at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival,led to scores of glowing reviews, making the film a cult hit. While many critics and fans were praising Tarantino, he developed a sizable number of detractors. During 1993, Tarantino wrote and directed his next feature, Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that May, beginning the flood of good reviews for the picture. Made for eight million dollars, the film eventually grossed over 100 million dollars and topped many critics’ top ten lists; it earned seven Academy Award nominations and won one for Tarantino and Avery’s writing.

At the beginning of 1995, he directed a segment of the anthology film Four Rooms and acted in Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to El Mariachi, Desperado. In 1996, he served as the screenwriter and executive producer for From Dusk Till Dawn, and the following year renewed some of his earlier acclaim as the director and screenwriter of Jackie Brown and in 1999, he was back behind the camera as the producer for From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money. In late 2002/early 2003, hype would soon start to build around his fourth feature, Kill Bill (2003). A kinetic homage to revenge movies of the 1970s, Kill Bill Vol. 1 featured Uma Thurman as a former assassin known as “The Bride.” While the first film in the pair was an eye-popping homage to Asian cinema and all things extreme, the outrageous violence of Kill Bill Vol. 1 stood in stark contrast to the dialogue-driven Kill Bill Vol.2 that concluded the epic tale of revenge and betrayal. The gambit of separate releases paid off, as both earned a combined sum of more than 130 million dollars domestically.

In 2005, Tarantino agreed to take part in the filming of Sin City by director Robert Rodriguez, not only to repay the versatile filmmaker for providing soundtrack music for the Kill Bill films, but also to try his hand at digital filmmaking. After this, the two directors joined forces again, for one of the most ballyhooed and hotly anticipated pictures of 2007: Grindhouse. A no-holds-barred elegy to the sleazy, seedy, often half-dilapidated inner-city theaters of the 1970s that would churn out similarly sleazy movies, Tarantino and Rodriguez divided Grindhouse into two portions: the first half, Death Proof, directed by Tarantino, starred Kurt Russell in homage to the high-octane auto thrillers of the ‘70s. Merging low-brow thrills with blunt, existential dialogue, the Tarantino segment garnered the lion’s share of the film’s considerable critical praise, although the three-hour-plus Grindhouse ultimately failed to connect with audiences, much to the dismay of The Weinstein Company, who released it. Separate versions of Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror were then prepped for European release, with Tarantino’s effort screened in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:113658~T1)