Quentin Tarantino may be one of the most celebrated directors in the world, but at his home in Tel Aviv, it’s his wife, actress/singer Daniella Pick, who wears the pants.
That’s the message from the recent flap over whether the Tarantino-Pick family is moving to London. Tarantino told the podcast, The Church of Tarantino, last week that he and his family would be relocating to the UK while he works on a play to be presented at London’s West End.
Tarantino, 62, has said that he is planning to direct only one more movie. He had worked on a movie that was to be about a movie critic, but scrapped plans for that, and now is going to give theater a try.
He said that while he was planning to write for the British stage, he loves spending time at home with their two children, Leo and Ariana, at the moment. “I’m enjoying my time with the kids and my family,” he said. “Let me just spend the rest of the year with them. Then I’ll probably move to England and bring my family with me to work on the play.”
But Pick clarified this statement with a post to her Instagram story on Monday, in which she wrote, in Hebrew, on a blue background with white letters: “We’ve been asked a lot, so just to clarify — we are not moving to England. The idea is that during periods when my husband is in London for two or three weeks for work, we will of course be there with him. There’s no place like home.” She ended the story with an Israeli flag emoji.
Quentin Tarantino's life in Israel
Since his marriage to Pick, the daughter of the late Israeli rock icon, Tzvika Pick, in 2018 and especially since the births of their children in 2020 and 2022, the director known for violence and snark has become an unlikely family man and resident of north Tel Aviv. While for years he dated many actresses, including Mira Sorvino, he eventually settled down with Pick, whom he met while promoting Inglourious Basterds in Israel in 2009.
He didn’t discuss the war in Gaza or missiles fired at Tel Aviv in the podcast, although in the early days of the war, he met with IDF soldiers on a base and posed for photos with them. In 2020, in an interview with Yediot Aharonot, he was asked about missiles being fired from Gaza from time to time, and he said, sounding very Israeli, “I’m not scared at all. Like everyone else here, I don’t really notice it.”
For years, he has been speaking about his love for his children and his attempts to learn Hebrew, and he told the podcast, “When my daughter comes home at three from school, her first thing is ‘Abba abba abba.’ That’s Hebrew for daddy. She hasn’t seen daddy all day, so she comes up ‘Abba abba abba abba,’ and you know, I like being there.”
He continued: “It’s just really precious to me, you know, and three years from now, four years from now, it’ll be maybe a little less precious. They’ll start moving on. They’ll start having their own friends and everything, but just right now is not the time to run away with the circus.”
Pick, who had a cameo in Tarantino’s last film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, will have her first starring role in the upcoming movie, The Perfect Gamble, directed by Israeli-American Danny A. Abeckaser. The movie reportedly tells the story of two gamblers played by David Arquette (Scream) and Abeckaser, who open a casino after their release from prison, and get in hot water with the Russian mob. Pick will play the girlfriend of one of the men. The movie was recently acquired by Saban Films.
But while an acting career for Pick may beckon, the family shows every sign of putting down roots in Israel. The Israeli business newspaper Globes reported in late April that Tarantino and Pick bought property in the Tel Baruch neighborhood of Tel Aviv for a reported NIS 50 million, consisting of two homes which they plan to demolish and make into a single dwelling.
As Pick made clear in her Instagram post, Tarantino will indeed be there for his children when they come home from school – in Tel Aviv.