How did working at a video store shape Quentin Tarantino?
You’d assume all directors are cinephiles, but there are more filmmakers than you’d expect who lack the deep cinematic knowledge you’d think comes with the job. That’s not the case with Quentin Tarantino. His style is steeped in old movies, no matter how obscure – and that might not have been possible if he hadn’t worked at California’s Video Archives rental store.
Before Tarantino made his debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, which sent waves through the film industry with its unashamedly violent and stylish approach, he found himself working in a video rental shop during the 1980s. This was where his true cinematic education began. The filmmaker already loved movies, but being in the presence of countless titles was enough to inspire an obsession within him that is still burning bright today.
It’s rare that you get to work in a field that completely engulfs you in your favourite thing, but Tarantino was lucky enough to be surrounded by VHS tapes daily, able to talk endlessly about movies and watch them when he wasn’t on shift. Here, he discovered an unimaginable number of films, and he found it to be “a movie lover’s heaven,” he told the BBC. “It was really terrific.”
During his time at Video Archives, Tarantino found a cinematic soulmate in the form of his co-worker Roger Avary, and the pair would begin collaborating with each other, resulting in them both winning a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Academy Award for Pulp Fiction. Clearly, Tarantino’s experience in the shop was incredibly formative, setting him up for a successful life as one of the most famous filmmakers of all time.
“Until I became a director, it was the best job I’d ever had, and I ended up working there for five years,” Tarantino revealed in the same interview, and it’s no surprise. His time at the shop introduced him to some terrific titles, shaping his knowledge of the world, cinema, and subsequently, filmmaking. He never went to college, but he recalls working at Video Archives as the closest thing he could’ve gotten to the “college experience”.
He said: “You can skip college but you probably won’t skip the college experience. If you don’t go to college you’ll find it somewhere else, and in that it became Video Archives. We became a group of friends and we all did all these things together, it was like we were like in college together, and we were just working our way through the school.”
Tarantino’s love of unique titles that he found at the store, from rare exploitation films to classic westerns, shaped his approach to genre, something he doesn’t like to adhere to very strongly. The filmmaker has made everything from crime dramas and martial arts movies to westerns and historical flicks, demonstrating a wide love for cinema in all its shapes and sizes.
It’s hard to imagine what would’ve become of Tarantino if he hadn’t landed the job at Video Archives. Would he have become a director? It seems safe to say that the director wouldn’t be who he is today if he hadn’t gotten the chance to soak up a world of cinematic influences and meet like-minded individuals who encouraged him to become a legendary filmmaker.
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