Board of Actor-Directors: 30 Who Excel in Dual Role

QUENTIN TARANTINO
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
If you gave guns to Glengarry Glen Ross' real-estate hustlers, they might become Tarantino's gangsters, with their hypermacho attitudes and hyperliterate speech. Making as bold a directing debut as Hollywood had seen in decades, Tarantino (who had a small role as one of the gang) turns a little tale of a heist gone wrong into an opera of blood and betrayal.

Pulp Fiction (1994)
Tarantino's rule-rewriting, time-shifting crime-and-redemption saga changed the game for independent film, for the balance of power at the Oscars, for the whole gangster genre, and of course, for John Travolta. All that for a movie that was really about nothing more than the sheer kinetic joy of cinema, whether its pleasures come from watching Travolta dance, Bruce Willis wield a samurai sword, or Samuel L. Jackson spit out his favorite 12-letter word.

Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 (2003, 2004)
Tarantino took every disreputable action movie from around the world that he'd ever seen and threw them against the wall of his fascination with Uma Thurman to see what would stick. Most of it did, and the two-part revenge epic surprised viewers with both its extreme violence and extreme tenderness.