It took an entire day for the Israeli press to learn that Quentin Tarantino was hanging out in the obstetrics ward of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv in early July. He and his wife, Daniella Pick, were expecting their second child, a girl who would join their 2-year-old son Leo — but as their style has become in Israel, the Tarantinos hid in plain sight.
So much so that the other moms-to-be on the floor had no idea they were keeping company with an Oscar winner. “I heard he was there from our midwife, but I never saw Tarantino,” said Carnie, an actress who gave birth to her daughter in Ichilov at the same time.
The darkly humorous director of films such as ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Kill Bill’ has been living a quiet life in the sunny Mediterranean metropolis for three years. Tel Aviv may seem like an unexpected landing for Tarantino, but it could also be his happy life.
Tarantino, 59, and Pick, 38, met in 2009 when he premiered his film “Inglorious Basterds” in Israel, dating occasionally before getting married in an intimate Jewish ceremony at their Beverly Hills home nine years later.
Pick is practically royalty in Israel, where she has been as famous as Tarantino since birth. Her father is Svika Pick, an iconic 1970s Israeli pop musician with long locks and an eccentric sense of style, and she is a musician herself – in the early 2000s, she and her brother Sharona were in a band called The Pick Sisters.
When the couple’s son, Leo, named after his maternal great-grandfather, not father’s frequent star DiCaprio, was born in February 2020, it was an amalgamation of two cultural icons for Israelis. “There is a person whose father is Quentin Tarantino and grandfather is Svika Pick,” marveled at viral tweets in Hebrew after Leo’s birth. (A follow-up tweet earlier this month noted that there are now two such little ones in Israel.)
Shortly after their wedding, the couple bought a six-bedroom, 2,900-square-foot villa on Elkakhi Street in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a quiet neighborhood in northern Tel Aviv and spying distance from the Mediterranean Sea. (The director still owns a New York City apartment, along with a Los Angeles home he bought in 1989, where he and Pick were married.)
Tarantino settled after finishing production of 2019’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” planning to split time between Tel Aviv and LA. Then the pandemic hit — and he never left.
Since then, the Oscar-winning director has become a regular Tel Aviv dad — the type locals regularly encounter when walking down the street or attending a toddler’s birthday party. with his child in a local playground (where he happily hummed “Happy Birthday” in Hebrew).
During his first few years in Israel, Tarantino experienced an armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2019. “My Israeli friends tell me, ‘After the missiles, you can now officially call yourself an Israeli,'” Tarantino told Yediot of the country. Aharonot newspaper in an interview in 2021.
His first neighbors knew he was there—according to Orit Bezalel, who lived two houses away—the family’s moving boxes had “Tarantino” written on them—but the director was like a ghost at first.
“I’ve never seen or heard of him,” Bezalel said. Her son, an aspiring filmmaker, hoped to meet the old idol who now lives within spitting distance of his childhood home – but it never happened.
But then the pandemic happened and something seemed to change. In early 2020, the Tarantino family rented a 5,000-square-foot villa in Tel Aviv’s Shikun Tzameret neighborhood for a reputed NIS 80,000 (about $23,000) per month. It’s an upscale, if somewhat sleepy, address in northern Tel Aviv, close to Israel’s fanciest shopping address, Kikar HaMedina (State Square).
In a city where most people live in boxy apartment buildings, Shikun Tzameret is a rarity: a pocket of architecturally impressive private villas tucked among luxury residential skyscrapers, but with a small-town feel. Built in the early 1950s, it has always been the place where old money types and successful creatives flocked to live tasteful, but not necessarily flashy, lives.
Tarantino is often seen jogging, walking or cycling in Park Hayarkon, a sprawling urban park along the Hayarkon River. While most Tel Avivs leave Tarantino alone, he has become catnip for local paparazzi, who have caught him filling his water bottle at the park’s water fountains and buying toddler bikes at the mall.
“I love the country, and the people are very nice, very kind to me, and they seem excited to have me here,” Tarantino said in a 2020 interview with Yedioth Aharonot.
He told Bill Maher in a 2021 interview that Tel Aviv is a smaller version of LA with “beautiful restaurants, cool bars, cool clubs.”
In June, Tarantino and Pick were spotted at Nilus, a hip bar on seedy Allenby Street. He’s also a fan of the restaurant at Hotel Montefiore, Tel Aviv’s first “boutique” hotel that’s popular with the city’s classy crowd (and the likes of 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 he’s a regular at Café Zorik, a neighborhood cafe on family-friendly Yehudah HaMaccabi Street, within walking distance of the family’s villa. According to a waiter there, if the director is in town, he will claim his usual place at the bar two to four times a week.
English is often heard in Zorik, which probably fits the director’s limited Hebrew. During an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in 2021, he admitted to mastering a toddler’s language, for example because he knows the names of farm animals. His son calls him Abba, the Hebrew word for papa.
Recently, Tarantino was also spotted at an Andrea Boccelli concert last month in Tel Aviv, just a few seats away from former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two have apparently been introduced, but Tarantino isn’t playing politics — or favorites: He also recently met former Israeli Prime Minister Benny Gantz, the man who ousted Netanyahu from power in May 2020.)
Another place Israelis know to look for Tarantino is at the cinema. There’s the Cinema City Glilot theater complex just north of Tel Aviv, where Tarantino stands in the concession line waiting for popcorn — and scrutinizing his own work. An eagle-eyed moviegoer spotted Tarantino in the back row at a screening of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (and of course immediately put it on Twitter).
Tarantino has also participated more formally in the local movie scene. Last February, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque hosted a retrospective of all his films. He was scheduled to appear at two of the screenings, but only made it to one after catching Covid. (The event went ahead as planned, and the Cinematheque asked viewers to send videos of themselves wishing the director well, who then put together a “Get Well, Quentin” montage for him.)
The director also received an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June to honor his career and new life in the Jewish nation. “Following his marriage to actress and musician Daniella Pick, Tarantino considers the State of Israel his home and publicly supports it worldwide,” the university announcement of the event said.
Tarantino has the famous saying that he will make 10 movies before he retires at the top of his game. His latest, 2019’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” was No. 9. The director’s first, “Reservoir Dogs,” was—perhaps prophetically—about a robbery of diamonds originally from Israel. So will Israel have another cameo in its 10th – and possibly last – feature?
Perhaps. “When you’re shooting a movie in Jerusalem, you can’t point the camera at anything that doesn’t capture something amazing,” he told Maher. But any potential movie would steer clear of politics. “I wouldn’t make a film about the political climate [in Israel].”