The “disgusting” movie Quentin Tarantino walked out of: “I just hated that”
Under most circumstances, no filmmaker wants to see audiences walking out of a screening of one of their movies. However, Quentin Tarantino wore it as a badge of honour, although he was indignant when the shoe ended up on the other foot.
It’s hardly controversial by today’s standards, but at the time, some viewers had no idea how to react to the two-time Academy Award winner’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, so they simply fucked off instead. On one occasion, Tarantino counted them, and there were no fewer than 33 walkouts.
Horror maestro Wes Craven was another who exited stage left before the heist flick without a heist reached the end credits, and the Pulp Fiction creator never forgot. Speaking of his sophomore effort, the adrenaline and pawn shop scenes also proved too hard for certain folks to handle, not that he minded.
For a self-appointed cinephile who’d grown up devouring the most boundary-pushing and taboo-shattering exploitation pictures that he could lay his eyes on, Tarantino was enthusiastic to be following in their footsteps by making something that created such a visceral reaction among the general public.
Not for the first time, though, he revealed himself to be more than a little bit of a hypocrite when the shoe was placed on the other foot, and he was the one doing the walking out. Then again, he had his reasons, because it’s not as if he was thrilled with what Oliver Stone had done to his Natural Born Killers screenplay.
It was a bone of contention for years, and one that created a feud between Tarantino and Woody Harrelson, despite the fact that they’d never actually met. He had every right to be affronted by the scene that tipped him over the edge, which featured a legendary comedian playing against type in a horrifying flashback to the childhood of Juliette Lewis’ Mallory Knox.
As a matter of principle, Tarantino was against Natural Born Killers from the beginning because the version that made it into cinemas bore very little resemblance to the version that was in his head when he scripted it, but that one harrowing moment told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t need to see anymore.
“I just hated that whole Rodney Dangerfield sequence so much,” he told Playboy, confirming that was the moment he walked out. “It was so unfunny, so disgusting. It did the number one thing I would never do: it came up with a little peanut psychological origin for why these people were the way they were.”
That was the point of no return: Tarantino “rejected that in every way,” and he knew there was no chance that Stone would win him back over. It’s one of only two movies that he’s ever walked out of, and the other one is Bambi, obviously.
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