The “exciting and sexy” scene that made Quentin Tarantino a better director: “It was really thrilling”
Having already called himself one of the two best directors in the business, alongside David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino knows that he’s pretty good at the whole filmmaking thing, and he has been for a while.
Even those who don’t enjoy his bespoke brand of auteurism can’t deny that he’s one of the most important and influential figures in modern Hollywood, and the fact that ‘Tarantinoesque’ has entered the lexicon is about as definitive as it gets that he’s left a massive imprint on the industry.
He’s also got a habit of patting himself on the back, and as much as that self-confidence that borders on arrogance rubs some people the wrong way, he’s hardly talking out of his arse. After all, based entirely on acclaim, awards season recognition, and obvious influence on subsequent generations, few writers and directors in the last 30 years have their hooks set as deeply in cinema.
Of course, even the best in the game will admit there’s always room for improvement, something the two-time Academy Award winner discovered under unusual circumstances. It wasn’t on the set of one of his self-created pictures, but when he was placed on a tight schedule helming ‘Grave Danger’, the two-part finale of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation‘s fifth season, which aired in May 2005.
He’d already made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill by then, not to mention an episode of ER a decade previously, but his second tilt at television taught him some valuable lessons he wished he’d learned before he embarked upon Uma Thurman’s exhaustive rampage of revenge.
A scene toward the end of ‘Grave Danger’, which finds George Eads’ Nick Stokes kidnapped and buried alive, requires the rest of his team to pull him out of a plexiglass coffin, all while replacing his body weight with dirt to make sure a bomb that’s been primed to detonate upon his removal doesn’t go off, decimating everyone and everything in sight.
“I’d never shot a scene like that before,” he explained to GQ. “That’s like a proper action movie scene. And I don’t really have proper action movie scenes like that in my movies. On a movie schedule, that would be four days, easily, if not the whole week. And it was really thrilling, because we only had, especially on the last day, ‘This is it’. When we leave, we’re not coming back.”
Placed under additional pressure by knowing he only had a single day to capture the sequence to the best of his ability, Tarantino embraced the time constraints. “You have that rhythm all night long while you’re shooting,” he offered. “But that’s also kind of exciting, and that’s sexy.”
Maybe not the two words typically associated with freeing a man from a plastic tomb, but it nonetheless made him a better director, because he managed to shoot a scene unlike anything he’d shot before with less time than he’d been used to. “I actually taught myself something that was really interesting, that I kind of needed to teach myself,” Tarantino added. Namely, how to maximise his minutes.
“I had a question of, ‘Can I just work on a schedule?'” after Kill Bill “went out of control as far as the production was concerned.” CSI taught him that he could, and that “say something is going to take eight days, and then it takes eight days” approach that he learned making ‘Grave Danger’ is something he’s carried with him ever since.
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