The only time Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg have ever worked together
As one of Hollywood’s most famous directors, Quentin Tarantino has worked with some of the best actors in the business, and as one of its worst actors, though, the shoe has rarely been placed on the other foot.
During that bizarre time when the filmmaker was convinced he was a genuinely gifted thespian, which included a disastrous stint on Broadway, he didn’t exactly surround himself with the same calibre of auteur that he occupied on the other side of the camera.
Robert Rodriguez directed him several times, which made sense because they were friends, but the two-time Academy Award winner also worked under Jack Baran, Rory Kelly, and Steven Brill. No offence to those guys, but they’re not household names who’ve amassed a string of indelible credits, although Tarantino did make a cameo appearance in Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django.
Like almost every other director, aspiring or otherwise, to have emerged in the last 50 years, the Reservoir Dogs creator has a deep appreciation and admiration for Steven Spielberg. He adores Jaws, calling it one of the greatest movies ever made, and has absorbed plenty of advice from the living legend. Spielberg helped soften the blow of Pulp Fiction playing the bridesmaid to Forrest Gump‘s bride in every major awards season category that wasn’t for screenwriting in the mid-1990s, and he helped soothe Tarantino’s bruised ego when the Grindhouse experiment was declared dead on arrival.
They’ve only worked together once in a professional capacity, and there’s at least one generation who have absolutely no idea it even happened. There’s a very good reason for that, because the 1996 video game simulator, Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair, holds zero cultural cache outside of the people who played it the first time around.
Released when everyone seemed convinced that full-motion video games were the next great evolutionary step for the medium, Spielberg directed the live-action segments and guided users on how to master the many facets of filmmaking, and one of those sequences featured Tarantino, and it was weird.
He wakes up screaming in a prison cell, before the camera lovingly focuses on a Reservoir Dogs poster as Tarantino delivers a short monologue about coconut oil and the smell and burning hair, before resuming screaming and then looking around in a desperate attempt to emote like a semi-convincing actor, and he screams again.
Sure, it was part of a larger sequence where he played a death row inmate, which placed his terrible acting front and centre in another stark reminder that he was never cut out to be a performer, but that doesn’t make it any less bizarre or a part of cinematic history that’s long since been forgotten as the first and last collaboration between Spielberg and Tarantino.
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