The ‘Reservoir Dogs’ actor Quentin Tarantino fired after three days: “He really pissed off everyone”
There is perhaps no image more famous from Quentin Tarantino’s filmography than the sight of men in suits and sunglasses strolling across a parking lot, with his low-budget indie drama about the aftermath of a botched robbery becoming a core part of his cinematic legacy. Despite being one of his earliest films, Reservoir Dogs contains many of the qualities that now define his style, with a sprawling ensemble cast, the presence of Harvey Keitel and his rapid-paced dialogue that leaves your head spinning.
Throughout the rest of his films, Tarantino has built on the trademarks that he established during this era, becoming an emblem of independent cinema through his undying love of the medium and an endless fountain of knowledge on the movies that inspired him most.
But while we might imagine it as a nearly flawless directorial debut, with legendary stories around the production of the film and how Tarantino financed it, it was not an immaculate creative process, with some disputes around the cast that led to a nearly irreversible mistake involving one of the lead actors.
With the likes of Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel in your cast, what could possibly go wrong? Well, when working with a hothouse of star personalities and egos, many things can go wrong on set, with countless movies comprising of stellar actors resulting in turmoil as a result of clashing personas and ideas.
When shooting Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino had issues with one cast member in particular, with Buscemi describing the drama that plagued that production and resulted in someone being fired. When discussing this, Buscemi said, “Lawrence Tierney is great in that. Unfortunately, he, I mean, he was a little bit loopy. He was, you know, he got very distracted like when we were doing the scene where he’s handing out the colours and he’s telling us you know like what we’re going to do, he had a hard time memorizing his lines and he could only do it like line by line and you had to sit there off camera straight as a board… And everybody got upset with him. One by one the actors like got up and started to leave”.
Despite the fact that his slightly haphazard approach rubbed everyone up the wrong way, Buscemi tried to persevere with his patience and stick it out, explaining, “But I stuck it out. It was like me, Quentin, Chris Penn, and Eddie Bunker were the only ones left at the end. But we had to sit like perfectly still. But he really pissed off everybody and after the third day, Quentin fired him. He was so mad he fired him. And Harvey said, ‘You can’t fire him we just shot for three days’”.
However, Tarantino is never one to play by the rules, and while he still remained in the final film, it seems as though Tierney wasn’t hanging around the production for very long and it was an in-and-out job as catastrophic as the one his character committed on screen.
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