The real reason Quentin Tarantino rejected Pink Floyd for ‘Reservoir Dogs’
Legendary director and prolific foot-fetishist Quentin Tarantino is notorious for starting every script by choosing its soundtrack. “One of the things I do when I am starting a movie, when I’m writing a movie, or when I have an idea for a film,” Tarantino wrote for the liner notes of his soundtrack compilation, “Is I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ eventually I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in particular, ‘Oh, this will be a great opening credit song.’”
Before he puts a single word of his stylistic dialogue to paper, he’ll dig around in his record collection, pulling up sleeves that might allow him to access a particular character, scene, or theme.
The director’s favourite soundtrack of all time isn’t his own, though. He once settled on Tony Scott’s Revenge as his preferred soundtrack. Tarantino said, “Out of all the soundtracks, this is the best. It’s from a Tony Scott movie—he directed True Romance—and it’s a very lush, elegant score. You don’t need to know the film to enjoy the soundtrack: It works in its own right.” It is this dedication that he has brought to all his movies.
This obsession with finding the perfect song has led to some of cinema’s most unforgettable moments. Take, for example, the scene in Pulp Fiction in which Uma Thurman dances to Urge Overkill’s rendition of the Neil Diamond hit ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’. He is so specific about music choices that he’ll even include their names in the script, envisioning the entirety of a scene at will. It is a gift he has bestowed to his films from the very start of his career.
For his film Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino knew he needed something unforgettable, something to heighten the sleazy cool of that iconic opening shot in which the suited central characters walk away from a diner in slow motion. He needed something that captured the tone of the film and its characters’ reckless, cash-hungry worldview. It was a delicate balance that could only be pulled off by one of the steadiest hands in the business, even if he was only on his first step.
For Tarantino, only one song would do both of those things, and that was ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd. The track comes from the band’s 1973 album Dark Side Of The Moon and is characterised by the way it utilises tape loops and samples of cash registers and the jungle of coins. These sound effects heighten the tracks’ underlying rhythm, one which – as Tarantino knew only too well – makes the song perfect to walk to. The jingling of coins in a pocket would have been the ultimate soundtracking moment.
Tarantino insisted that the track be used in the opening sequence, but Pink Floyd’s work is famously difficult to get the rights for. Even when they’ve allowed filmmakers to use one of their songs, they’ve charged a hell of a lot of money for it. Although this was a concern, it wasn’t actually the reason Tarantino ended up ditching ‘Money’.
It was, in fact, the result of serendipity. Tarantino heard ‘Little Green Bag’ over the radio one day when Reservoir Dogs was in the middle of principal photography. As the track slid from the speaker, Tarantino was overcome by a wave of nostalgia and quickly ditched the idea of using ‘Money’. It was fortunate for the director because it’s unlikely Pink Floyd would have licensed the original track anyway, and the song he actually ended up using – by the George Baker Selection – gives the scene the slow, oozing cool which has made it so iconic.
Tarantino’s use of ‘Little Green Bag’ also showcases the director’s talent for taking rarities, B-sides, and obscure artists and giving them new life through his films. ‘Money’ was already such a big hit that it would have felt ill-suited to Tarantino’s outsider sensibility, to shining and golden to be polished by his cinematic cloth. It is the slightly odd-ball tracks he has used which have always been the most iconic, and Pink Floyd are too much a part of the musical establishment to function in that way. Thank God for the radio, that’s what I say.
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