“Just terrific”: the director Burt Reynolds and Quentin Tarantino agreed was the most underrated of all time
As soon as he decided that he wanted to become a filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino probably felt as though he was fated to work with Burt Reynolds one day, only for tragedy to rob him of the opportunity.
After all, the two-time Academy Award winner has confirmed that he was named after Quint Asper, the character played by Reynolds on the 1960s TV series, Gunsmoke. Even if they didn’t have a shared moniker, he’d have been a huge fan anyway, since it’s no secret that he loves John Boorman’s Deliverance.
In fact, Tarantino was a fan of Reynolds, full stop. He was one of the defining big-screen leading men of the ’70s, and since he earned a reputation for dusting off forgotten relics and rocketing them back to mainstream prominence in his films, there was a sense of inevitability that the Smokey and the Bandit star would make his way onto the list eventually.
He did, with Reynolds being cast as George Spahn in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with the veteran attending rehearsals and table reads of the script before the start of production, where he managed to leave Brad Pitt starstruck and come up with the line that Mike Moh’s Bruce Lee uses to get under Cliff Booth’s skin before the brawl that got the picture banned in China.
Sadly, Reynolds passed away in September 2018 at the age of 82, with Bruce Dern replacing him as Spahn. However, there was one moment that Tarantino will never forget, when he pitted his encyclopaedic knowledge of film and television against the moustachioed icon’s encyclopaedic memory of his own career, leading them to a shared conclusion over the identity of cinema’s most underrated director.
“Do you remember the director Bill Witney? I know you only worked with him three times,” the filmmaker asked, per Jay Glennie’s The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “Of course I do,” Reynolds replied. “Oh, that is great, great. I have to tell you that I think Witney is one of the most underrated action directors in the history of this town; I think he is just terrific,” Tarantino offered.
Even though their professional association only stretched to three episodes of Riverboat in the late 1950s, the actor felt the same way. “I agree with you,” he told the Pulp Fiction creator. “He was.” To illustrate his point, Reynolds shared an anecdote that more than likely left Tarantino weak at the knees, knowing his obsessiveness over the trivia tied to his favourite movies and TV shows.
According to Reynolds, Witney “worked under the assumption that there was no scene ever written that could not be improved by the addition of a fistfight,” which was music to Tarantino’s ears. Even when he was shooting dialogue scenes, Witney would rip up the script and insist that the two performers should punctuate their words with actions, namely by punching each other in the face.
The auteur has always defended Witney as one of the most underappreciated, overlooked, unsung, and unfairly underrated directors in Hollywood history, and he would have been like a kid in a sweet shop after discovering that Reynolds was fully on board with his hypothesis.
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