Quentin Tarantino is indeed one of the finest directors now. Known to dabble across genres with his peculiar filmmaking, the influential director has multiple accolades to his name now. Not only has his directorial oeuvre inspired multiple pop-culture norms, but his work has also influenced modern filmmaking.
Even though he is counted among the top directors in the world, there was once a time when Tarantino felt his career as a director was over long before it began. And this was a result of an altercation that took place between the director and an actor on the set of his first-ever directorial venture.
Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Career-Ending’ Altercation
Among the many challenges that directors often face in their first ventures, the most difficult can be dealing with an uncooperative actor. Having such actors can have disastrous consequences and may even result in the projects being shelved. For the celebrated director Quentin Tarantino, his first challenge as a budding director started when he hired actor Lawrence Tierney for a supporting role in Reservoir Dogs.
Reservoir Dogs was Tarantino’s first directorial debut with a very intricate and captivating storyline. However, the first week was a complete mess since they had decided to film Tierney’s scenes first.
“Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time – he just needed to be sedated. We had decided to shoot his scenes first, so my first week of directing was talking with this f**king lunatic.”
It wasn’t just the Kill Bill director who was having a hard time but the entire cast and crew.
“He was personally challenging to every aspect of film-making. By the end of the week everybody on set hated Tierney – it wasn’t just me. And in the last 20 minutes of the first week we had a blow out and got into a fist fight.”
The late actor already had an infamous reputation for being extremely hard to work with and was known to have multiple troubles with the law. Inevitably, Tarantino fired him.
Harvey Keitel Saved Quentin Tarantino’s Career
Not only was Lawrence Tierney hard to work with but he was infamous for often brawling or getting into fights. The fight with Tarantino was the last straw for the director who ended up firing him much to the amusement of the whole crew.
“I fired him, and the whole crew burst into applause.”
But after firing him Tarantino got into major trouble with the studio, which made him believe that he too was on the road of being kicked out as well.
“And I thought: OK, now I’m going to get fired. That’s it; that’s my shot at being a director, gone, after one week.”
Thankfully the movie’s star Harvey Keitel stepped in to save Tarantino. His intervention, fortunately, helped clear whatever tension was on between the director and the studio, thus, saving the career of one of the best directors in Hollywood.
Reservoir Dogs can be streamed on Netflix.
Source: The Guardian
