Behind-the-scenes footage of Quentin Tarantino masterpiece ‘Reservoir Dogs’
Before Quentin Tarantino burst onto the movie-making scene with his feature film debut Reservoir Dogs, very few could have predicted just how much impact the director would go on to impart on Hollywood. The film, starring the likes of Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, and Michael Madsen diamond thieves whose planned heist of a jewellery store goes terribly wrong, Tarantino announced himself in spectacular fashion.
Released as the result of years of pent-up creativity, Tarantino’s debut film radiates the same flair and enthusiasm that would later make him a household name, with the 28-year-old director clearly having so much fun with the project’s many avenues of creativity. Incorporating many motifs that have since become hallmarks of Tarantino, the film is laden with crime, pop-culture references, eccentric characters and the use of nonlinear storytelling that has long set the filmmaker apart from his peers. It should perhaps come as little surprise, given his love for cinematic greats, that Tarantino later explained that Reservoir Dogs was influenced by Stanley Kubrick movie The Killing: “I didn’t go out of my way to do a rip-off of The Killing, but I did think of it as my ‘Killing’, my take on that kind of heist movie,” he explained.
The 1992 movie focuses on the thieves before and after the heist, following the gang as they come together at the rendezvous point. As an audience, we twist and turn with every new arrival to the story as different members of the group deliver vital pieces of information as to what exactly went wrong with their carefully laid plans.
As well as having an incredibly intense and gripping storyline, the film stands firm as a cult classic because of its impossibly cool styling, a cinematic standpoint many have come to expect from Tarantino in the years that followed the release of Reservoir Dogs. From the black and white uniform suits to the character code names, Tarantino meticulously styled his shots and worked closely with the acclaimed ensemble cast to deliver his vision as closely as possible.
Years later, reflecting on the legacy of his debut, Tarantino stated: “One of the things I get a big kick out of in Reservoir Dogs is that it plays with theatrical elements in a cinematic form—it is contained, the tension isn’t dissipated, it’s supposed to mount, the characters aren’t able to leave, and the whole movie’s definitely performance-driven. Both my films are completely performance-driven, they’re almost cut to the rhythm of performance”.
What transpires is one of the finest heist films ever made and undoubtedly one of the most important movies of the 1990s. It birthed a career for Tarantino that would go on to show him as one of Generation X’s zeitgeist auteurs, deeply referencing the world around I’m while building his audience their own universe.
There’s no doubt that Tarantino would go on to be known as one of the most vital filmmakers of our lifetime, and what better way to get acquainted with the director than by peeking behind the scenes of his first feature film. See footage from behind the scenes, below.
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