RESERVOIR DOGS
Back in 1992, Empire met an excitable unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. These were our first impressions of the man who’d soon conquer Hollywood.
Tall, rangy and sporting an unkempt thatch of hair, Quentin Tarantino is not your immediate idea of a “man of the moment”. Tucked away in the corner of a Whitehall pub, he is more interested in this, his third pint of draught guinness, than buying into the next Big Thing malarkey.
Probably because he wolfed down too many E numbers as a child, Tarantino is extremely animated. He is also eminently likeable, which probably explains how he got away without a dressing-down from the world’s number-one female recording artist [Madonna], having described her as a “regular fuck machine” in his script. Speaking quickly in a voice not unlike that of Mickey dolenz and punctuating his enthusiasm — “It’s a really incendiary movie, you can’t show it to an audience without getting a reaction” — with words like “man” and “cool”, he really is rather proud of his creation.
So he should be. The 29year-old writer-director has come a long way in the last couple of years. after training as an actor and enduring various false starts on the production side of things (his first job was as an assistant on a dolph lundgren video, literally clearing the dog shit out of the car park so dolph wouldn’t get his trainers dirty), he spent six years killing time in an la video shop until one day, out of pure frustration, he began to hatch a big idea.
“It’s a simple fact that I get a kick out of heist films, so I thought I’d write one,” begins Tarantino matter-of-factly. “I’d had the idea in my head about a film that doesn’t take place during the robbery, but in the rendezvous afterwards. When I worked at the video store we had this one shelf that was like a revolving film festival and every week I would change it. and one time I had heist films, like Rififi and Topkapi and The Thomas Crown Affair. I started taking them home and it was in the context of seeing a heist movie every night that I put my head round what a neat genre that would be to redo.” The guinness long forgotten, Tarantino is now in full swing.
“The thing about heist films is they have this built-in suspense mechanism,” he babbles, “even with something like Treasure Of The Four Crowns, you know, that crazy 3d movie, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, they’re getting too close to the beam,’ and you get real nervous, so I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do one of these.’ and I thought I’d write one where they all got away, ’cause I hated it — I hated it — where they’d do the robbery and by some little quirk, fate steps in and fucks ’em over.”
Idea firmly implanted, Tarantino scarpered off to the stationery shop and purchased a set of felt-tip pens and a notebook — “you can’t write poetry on a computer” — declaring to his gobsmacked mates that these were the tools with which he was going to create a masterpiece and, over the course of three weeks, he duly bashed out a script. Backed by an influx of residual cheques from the repeat fees of an episode of The Golden Girls in which he had played an Elvis impersonator, Tarantino ran his idea by producer chum lawrence Bender and, armed with $30,000 and a 16mm camera, set about making his movie.