Welcome To The Doghouse: The Making Of Reservoir Dogs
Written and directed by a video store clerk, produced by a ballet dancer, rescued by Harvey Keitel: yes, it's the violent indie heist movie that saved cinema from itself.
A version of this article appeared in Hotdog.
Quentin Tarantino (director/writer/actor, Mr Brown): I wrote True Romance and spent two years looking for money. I wrote Natural Born Killers, hoping to direct it myself for half-a-million dollars. After a year-and-a-half, I was no further along. It was then out of frustration that I wrote Reservoir Dogs. 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 - David Carradine week or Nicholas Ray week or swashbuckler movies, whatever. And one time I had heist films such as Riffifi 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 got my head around what a neat genre it would be to redo.
Monte Hellman (executive producer): A lot of people have said that Reservoir Dogs is a great heist movie but it’s so much more. In fact, it isn’t really a heist movie at all because we never see the heist!
Quentin Tarantino: I wanted Reservoir Dogs to be about an event we don’t see and I wanted it all to take place at the rendezvous, at the warehouse - what would normally be given 10 minutes in a heist movie. I wanted the whole film to be set there and to play with a real-time clock as opposed to a movie clock ticking.
Monte Hellman: You only need to read the script to grasp how intelligent Quentin is and how unique his understanding of film. Were he French, he’d be considered a pantheon director. His structure and storytelling is a million miles ahead of anything else in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino: I was going to go really guerilla-style. I decided, I’m gonna write a film to do for $30,000 - 12 days, black-and-white, starring some of my friends.
Lawrence Bender (producer/actor, Young Cop): I never wanted to be a producer. We see life very differently, Quentin and I. He’s always known what he’s wanted to do - I think in his last life, before he was born, he knew what he wanted to be. I’ve never known what I wanted to be and I still don’t.
Quentin Tarantino: Lawrence was a real godsend.
Lawrence Bender: We were both very broke. Quentin didn’t have a car so he couldn’t drive over to my place. I didn’t have money so I wasn’t paying for Xeroxes. So I went over to his place and I read the script. And obviously I flipped over it - it was an extraordinary piece of writing. And I said, ‘Look, you gotta give me some time. I think I can raise some real money for this movie.’
Quentin Tarantino: I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no - I’ve heard that so much!'
Lawrence Bender: He ended up giving me two months which, as I’m sure any sane person knows, is insane. It’s really undoable, especially for two people who nobody knows about. I found a video company with half-a-million dollars and then another investor up in Canada with half-a-million dollars but only if his girlfriend could play Mr Blonde! It was such a whacky idea that we actually considered it. I mean, it was 180 degrees off the wall.
Monte Hellman: There was a brief period where it looked like I might direct Resevoir Dogs. I was given the script and I loved it and so I arranged to meet Quentin for an ice-cream sundae - although I don’t eat ice cream. We talked and he said he’d liked some of my movies and I told him I liked his script. Then he said, “I’m sorry to waste your time but I really want to direct this movie myself.’ I said I could appreciate that but that I‘d really like to be involved in the movie in some capacity, and that’s how I became executive producer.
Lawrence Bender: Monte was like our godfather. He came in and baby-sat the production. Then, no sooner have we got him on board than we get Harvey Keitel. I’d got the script to an acting coach Lily Parker who knew Harvey and she gave it to him to read.
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