Reservoir Dogs: why the producers did not want Tarantino’s film

If we imagine why Reservoir Dogs would make a good play, it’s because it has a quasi unity of place and few actors. Except that this aspect of the film has long played against him, at the time when its director Quentin Tarantino was looking for funding.

Remember that Reservoir Dogs tells the post robbery of a band of crooks and that the majority of the film is based on its dialogues, its actors and that the action takes place almost exclusively in a warehouse.

At the time of the film’s preparation, potential producers considered Reservoir Dogs to have a better place on stage, as Tarantino revealed in 1994 to Movie Howat the time of Pulp Fiction’s promotion:

It was really a problem, [quand] I was trying to finance [Reservoir Dogs]. people were reading [le scénario] and said to me, ‘It’s not a movie, it’s a play, why don’t you try to play it on a small stage instead?’ And I would say, ‘No, no, no, believe me, it will be cinematic’.

The film therefore did not find takers, and had difficulty mounting, but Tarantino knew that the theatrical aspect of his film was only the pretext to camouflage his small budget:

“I don’t like most theatrical film adaptations”confided the filmmaker in 1994, “but the reason I wanted it all to happen in one play is that it was the easiest way to shoot. For me, the most important thing was that it was cinematic.”

That said, the future director of the behind-closed-doors Western The Hateful Eight was the first to recognize what his films had “stung” in the theater:

“But it’s true that one of the things that kicks me in Reservoir Dogs is that we play with elements of theater in a cinematic form – it’s collected, the tension is not dissipated, it is supposed to go up, the characters aren’t able to come out, and the film is really driven by the performances. Both of my films are really driven by the performances of the actors, and almost climbed to that beat.”

Metropolitan FilmExport

Eventually, producer Lawrence Bender will trust Tarantino, then inexperienced, to direct the project, which will be released in theaters. In France, it landed on the screens on September 2, 1992, bringing together a little over 300,000 curious people.

And for the record, Reservoir Dogs was indeed adapted into a play after its theatrical release, notably by a very young Michael Fassbender who was only 18 at the time and who had recreated the movie in his Irish hometown, taking on the role of Mr. Pink, played in the film by Steve Buscemi.