Recently interviewed by Empire, Quentin Tarantino revealed how he came up with the title of his first feature film.
Since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s first film in 1992, moviegoers have been struggling to understand its title. Original, mysterious and even enigmatic, this “Reservoir Dogs” has long intrigued, giving rise to many theories about its meaning and origin.
Is it a nod to Brian de Palma’s Body Double, in which we could see a dog falling into a tank? Or is it a reference to Goodbye children? Indeed, according to legend, while Tarantino was still working in a video store, one of his clients would have mispronounced the title of Louis Malle’s film, which would have given the famous “Reservoir Dogs”.
However, as the filmmaker recently declared at the microphone of Empire magazine, none of these hypotheses is correct. Indeed, when he came to present his new podcast, The Video Archives PodcastTarantino has finally lifted the veil on the mystery surrounding his title:
“No, it’s not from a client”did he declare.
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“It comes from me, to make fun of Buñuel’s film, Un Chien Andalou. I started calling my film Reservoir Dog in a parodic way. (…) It was to ridicule this kind of films. But by dint of calling my film like that, I said to myself: ‘It’s a great title! I have no fucking idea what that means, but it’s a great title!'”
Tarantino continues his explanation by saying that after finishing the script for his movie, he went to a McDonald’s and put the script on the counter to pick up his order. It was there that a young man, seeing the title, told him that he thought it was brilliant. Enough to convince the budding director!
(Re)discover the false connections of “Reservoir Dogs”…