Monte Hellman wanted to steal ‘Reservoir Dogs’ from Quentin Tarantino: “I’m going to direct it myself”
It’s been a long time since Quentin Tarantino has been a writer for hire, although it feels like his career is approaching the full-circle moment between Reservoir Dogs and whatever his tenth and final feature ends up being.
In the embryonic stages of his filmmaking life, Tarantino had no issues selling off one of his screenplays or rewriting somebody else’s. Tony Scott’s True Romance and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers are the most obvious examples, but there were also his uncredited polishes on the likes of Scott’s Crimson Tide, Michael Bay’s The Rock, and the diabolical Saturday Night Live spinoff It’s Pat.
Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn was the last time Tarantino wrote a script for a movie he didn’t direct, which is about to change now that David Fincher has been confirmed to helm a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel for Netflix. The two-time Academy Award winner was always adamant that Reservoir Dogs would be his feature-length debut, even if one of his favourite filmmakers disagreed.
Tarantino’s instant classic helped rewrite the rulebook for independent cinema in the 1990s, even if it wasn’t a runaway hit. However, international audiences caught onto the auteur’s distinctive style much quicker than those in the United States, and it’s not an exaggeration to say the decade would have turned out markedly different had anyone else been wielding the megaphone.
It didn’t just put Tarantino on the map: Reservoir Dogs inspired a slew of imitators, laid the groundwork for Pulp Fiction, and set the stage for everything that followed. Those two films reshaped the industry in the ’90s, and it wouldn’t have happened had Monte Hellman been the director.
No disrespect intended, but the guy was in his early 60s when he first met Tarantino, and his back catalogue includes B-movies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!, which was his most recent credit when he first crossed paths with Hollywood’s next wunderkind.
“Well, it was weird,” Tarantino admitted to Postif of his maiden encounter with Hellman. “I was a big fan of his work, and a mutual friend said he was going to get the script to him. I thought, great, I would love to hear what Monte Hellman had to say about the movie, though I wasn’t willing to give it up. But Monte thought he was being offered to direct it. So he read it like that.”
Tarantino explained that even though “it was a miscommunication,” Hellman still pitched himself for the gig: “We got together at this place on Hollywood Boulevard, CC Brown’s, a little ice-cream parlour, and we’re having a hot fudge sundae, and he says, ‘I can get the money for it. I’m going to direct it myself.'”
As much as Tarantino would be thrilled to have one of his heroes direct one of his scripts when he was still in his 20s and had no filmography to speak of, it would never be Reservoir Dogs. “There’d be no greater honour than to have Monte Hellman direct a script of mine,” he continued. “But this one’s for me.”
After realising that Tarantino wouldn’t budge and nobody else but him would be directing the heist flick that doesn’t show the house, Hellman instead offered his services as an executive producer. It would have been easy for the aspiring filmmaker to get starstruck and bend to the veteran’s whims, but Reservoir Dogs was only ever going to go into production as his first film.
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