Quentin Tarantino has admitted that he would work under a different name if he could start his career over.
The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director reflected on his family name in a new interview, revealing that while his birth father’s name was Tarantino, he grew up under his stepfather’s name Zastoupil.
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“I didn’t even know about the name Tarantino really at that time. I was Zastoupil,” he told Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “That was my name. I was always known by that. That’s how I learned to write.
“I never knew [my father] at all. So when I took the name Tarantino around 18 or 19, it was simply because it sounded cool, it was Italian. Quentin Tarantino sounded like a cool name. It had nothing to do with him. It had nothing to do with the family.
“It also had the benefit of reinvention, because I had never used it.”
He went on to admit: “If I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t use the name Tarantino. I would use my middle name, which is Jerome, as my last name. I would be Quentin Jerome.”
The filmmaker has been reflecting on his career lately, recently doubling down on claims that his next film will be his last and admitting that he considered a Reservoir Dogs reboot as his swansong.
Asked about going full circle on Real Time with Bill Maher, Tarantino said: “That’s kind of a ‘capture time in a moment’ kind of thing.
“I won’t do it, internet,” he added. “But I considered it.”
As for his reasons for retiring, he added: “I know film history and from here on in, filmmakers do not get better.
“Don Siegel – if he had quit his career in 1979, when he did Escape from Alcatraz, what a final film! What a mic drop. But he dribbles away with two more other ones, he doesn’t mean it.”
