The classic TV show Quentin Tarantino was banned from directing: “We made some special arrangements”
In the streaming era, Hollywood’s biggest directors regularly take their talents to the small screen to helm at least one episode of a major TV series, which isn’t out of the ordinary. However, Quentin Tarantino was ahead of the curve when he started dabbling in one-shot serialised storytelling.
Long before Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire, David Fincher’s House of Cards, the Wachowskis’ Sense8, Rian Johnson’s Breaking Bad, and Tim Burton’s Wednesday made it more common than ever for high-profile auteurs to make a detour into prestige TV, Tarantino tackled two massive ratings draws.
The medical drama ER was one of the biggest shows on television when the two-time Academy Award winner directed the first season’s penultimate episode ‘Motherhood’, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was already five seasons deep when he took the reins on the two-part finale ‘Grave Danger’.
Those two episodes aired a decade apart in 1995 and 2005, but the original plan was for the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction creator to make a quickfire return to TV on another zeitgeist-grabbing series. However, despite Tarantino’s enthusiasm, red tape quickly bogged down and ultimately scuppered his chance.
When he directed his ER episode, the filmmaker was granted a special waiver by the Directors Guild of America, of which he wasn’t a member. Presumably, he was operating under the impression the same thing would happen again when he set his sights on ‘Never Again’, the 13th episode of The X-Files‘ fourth run, which hit screens in February 1997.
Unfortunately, the two parties found themselves at an impasse. Although he’d been granted an exemption for ER, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had rubbed several industry figures the wrong way when they used a non-unionised crew while making the cult classic From Dusk Till Dawn.
The DGA thought he’d sign up and become an official member after ER, but he didn’t. With a hint of spite, the organisation simply refused to grant Tarantino another waiver to direct The X-Files to rob audiences of seeing what he could do with a story focusing on Mulder and Scully encountering a man under mind control by one of his tattoos.
“Quentin approached us, and we were very excited at the opportunity,” a spokesperson for 20th Century Fox Television shared. “We made some special arrangements, and we’re disappointed that it’s not happening. But we bow to Quentin’s philosophical stance. We hope something can be worked out for the future.”
Of course, nothing was worked out for the future despite The X-Files spanning 11 seasons and over 200 episodes. Beyond that, Tarantino has never directed an episode of TV since, although he did appear as an actor in Alias and briefly flirted with the idea of taking on a couple of episodes of Justified: City Primeval.
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