Legendary director Quentin Tarantino has quietly begun a new life as far away from Hollywood as you can.
It took the Israeli press a full day to learn that Quentin Tarantino was roaming the obstetrics room at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital in early July.
He and his wife Daniella Pick were expecting their second child, a baby girl, to be joined by their 2-year-old son, Leo.
But as has become his style in Israel, the Tarantinos hid from view.
So much so that the other pregnant mothers on earth had no idea they were keeping an Oscar winner company.
“I knew she was there for our midwife, but I never saw Tarantino,” said Carnie, an actress who gave birth to her daughter at the same time as Ichilov.
The dark humor director of movies like Pulp Fiction i Kill Bill he has been living a discreet life in the sunny Mediterranean metropolis for three years. Tel Aviv may seem like an unexpected landing for Tarantino, but it may be his happy forever.
Tarantino, 59, and Pick, 38, met in 2009 when they released their film Bastards without glory in Israel, going out and out before marrying in an intimate Jewish reform ceremony at her Beverly Hills home nine years later.
Pick is practically royalty in Israel, where she is as famous as Tarantino from birth. Her father is Svika Pick, an iconic Israeli pop musician of the 70s with long locks and a sense of eccentric style, and she herself is a musician: in the early 2000s, she and her sister Sharona formed a band called The Pick Sisters.
When the couple’s son, Leo, so named by his maternal great-grandfather, not by Tarantino’s usual star, DiCaprio, was born in February 2020, for Israelis it was a fusion of two cultural icons.
“There is a person whose father is Quentin Tarantino and whose grandfather is Svika Pick,” the viral tweets in Hebrew marveled after Leo’s birth. (A follow-up tweet earlier this month noted that there are now two of these little ones in Israel.)
Shortly after marrying, the couple bought a six-bedroom, 269-square-foot villa on Elkakhi Street in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a quiet neighborhood north of Tel Aviv and within walking distance of the Mediterranean. (The manager still owns an apartment in New York City along with a Los Angeles home he bought in 1989 where he and Pick got married.)
Tarantino was installed after finishing production in 2019 Once upon a time in Hollywood, planning to split the time between Tel Aviv and LA. Then came the pandemic, and it never went away.
Since then, the Oscar-winning director has become a regular Tel Aviv father: the type locals usually find walking down the street or attending a child’s birthday party with their child. in a local courtyard (where he sang happily “Happy Birthday” in Hebrew.).
During his early years in Israel, Tarantino experienced an armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2019.
“My Israeli friends tell me,‘ After the rockets, now you can officially call yourself Israeli, ’” Tarantino shared with the country’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper in a 2021 interview.
His first neighbors knew he was there — “Tarantino” had been written on the family’s moving boxes, according to Orit Bezalel, who lived two houses away — but the director was, at first, like a ghost.
“I never saw him or heard of him,” Bezalel said. His son, an aspiring filmmaker, hoped to meet the longtime idol he now lives within walking distance of his childhood home, but it never happened.
But then the pandemic passed and something seemed to change. In early 2020, the Tarantino family rented a 464-square-foot villa in Tel Aviv’s Shikun Tzameret neighborhood for about 80,000 NIS (approximately 34,000 Australian dollars) a month. It is a luxury address, albeit a bit sleepy, north of Tel Aviv and close to Israel’s most elegant shopping address, Kikar HaMedina (State Square).
In a city where most people live in square apartment buildings, Shikun Tzameret is a rarity: a pocket of architecturally stunning private villas amidst luxury residential skyscrapers, but with a small town feel. Built in the early 1950s, it has always been where old money types and successful creatives came together to live lives of good taste, but not necessarily flashy.
Tarantino is often seen running, walking or cycling in Hayarkon Park, a large urban park along the Hayarkon River. Although most Tel Avivis tend to leave Tarantino alone, it has become a catnip for local paparazzi, who have seen it fill its water bottle at the park’s water fountains and buy bicycles. for young children in the mall.
“I love the country and the people are very nice, very nice to me, and they seem excited because I’m here,” Tarantino said in a 2020 interview with Yediot Aharonot.
He told Bill Maher in a 2021 interview that Tel Aviv is like a smaller version of LA with “great restaurants, great bars, great clubs.”
In June, Tarantino and Pick were spotted at Nilus, a trendy bar on poor quality Allenby Street. He’s also a fan of the Hotel Montefiore restaurant, Tel Aviv’s first boutique hotel that’s popular with the city’s stylish people (and like Mick Jagger when he’s in town). Co-owner Mati Broudo can confirm “this wasn’t Tarantino’s first time” at the hotel’s restaurant; he also visited during the same trip to Israel in 2009 where he met his wife.
And it’s a regular at Café Zorik, a neighborhood cafe on Yehudah HaMaccabi Street, ideal for families, where you can walk from the family village. According to a waiter there, when the manager is in town he will claim his usual hanger at the bar two to four times a week.
English is often heard in Zorik, which is probably adapted from the director’s limited Hebrew. During an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in 2021, he admitted that he knew the language from a young child, knowing, for example, the names of farm animals. His son calls him Abba, the Hebrew word for father.
More recently, Tarantino was also seen at a concert by Andrea Boccelli last month in Tel Aviv, sitting a few seats away from former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It looks like the two were running, but Tarantino is not playing politics or favorites: he also recently met with former Israeli Prime Minister Benny Gantz, the man who ousted Netanyahu from power in May 2020.)
Another place the Israelis know to look for Tarantino is in the movies. There is the Cinema City Glilot theater complex north of Tel Aviv, where Tarantino has been seen standing in the concession line waiting for popcorn and examining his own work. An eagle-eyed spectator saw Tarantino in the back row at the a Once upon a time in Hollywood projection (and of course posted it quickly on Twitter).
Tarantino has also been more formally involved with the local film scene. Last February, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque hosted a retrospective that included all of its films. He was scheduled to appear in two of the screenings, but only reached one after taking Covid. (The event continued as planned and the Cinematheque asked viewers to send videos of themselves wishing the best to the director, who then compiled a “Get Well, Quentin” montage for him).
The director also received an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem this June to honor his career and new life in the Jewish nation. “After his marriage to actress and musician Daniella Pick, Tarantino considers the state of Israel his home and publicly supports him around the world,” the university’s announcement of the event noted.
Tarantino has famously said he will make 10 films before retiring at the helm of his game. His last, in 2019 Once upon a time in Hollywoodwas number 9. The first of the director, Reservoir Dogs, was, perhaps prophetically, a diamond theft originating in Israel. So will Israel reappear in its tenth and possibly last function?
May be. “If you’re making a film in Jerusalem, there’s no place where you can point the camera where you’re not capturing something fantastic,” he told Maher. But any potential film would move away from politics. “I would not make a film about the political climate [in Israel]. ”
This story originally appeared on page six and is republished here with permission.