“When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them no, I went to films.”
— Quentin Tarantino
From multiple interviews throughout the 1990s-2000s. Tarantino dropped out at 15, worked at Video Archives rental store, and educated himself by watching thousands of films.
1983. Twenty years old, video store, minimum wage. No diploma. No connections. No plan except watching every film on the shelf and figuring out how they worked. I rewound tapes, swept floors, memorized camera angles. Seven years later I directed Reservoir Dogs. The film school kids had degrees. I had five thousand movies in my head. Nobody gets to tell you the only way to learn. Find what you love, study it until it becomes part of you, and make something nobody else could have made.