Reservoir Dogs is a heist film that never shows the heist
Quentin Tarantino's 1992 debut skips the jewellery robbery entirely, leaving the crooks to argue about what went wrong in a warehouse. Its odd title came from a video-store customer who misheard a French film's name. Planned as a $30,000 black-and-white project with friends, it became an indie landmark once Harvey Keitel signed on.
Tarantino was a clerk at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California, when he conceived the film. His first plan was to shoot on 16 mm with himself as Mr. Pink and producer Lawrence Bender doubling as Nice Guy Eddie and a cop. The name, he said, arose when a patron garbled his recommendation of Au revoir les enfants into something that sounded like reservoir dogs.
The script travelled from Bender to his acting teacher, then to the teacher's wife, and finally to Keitel. Keitel came aboard as co-producer, which helped raise $1.5 million, and he funded casting in New York, where Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth were found. Roth chose Mr. Orange because it meant playing an Englishman pretending to be an American cop pretending to be a robber. Madsen wanted Pink, but Tarantino insisted on casting him as Blonde.
Leaving the robbery offscreen saved money and kept details murky. Tarantino likened it to Glengarry Glen Ross, where a burglary is discussed but never seen, and said he wanted a real-time feel rather than a movie clock. Influences are openly acknowledged: he called it his take on Kubrick's The Killing, drew on Kansas City Confidential, and borrowed the sharp-suited cool of Alain Delon in Melville's Le Samouraï. The warehouse scenes were shot in a disused mortuary still stocked with caskets and a hearse.
Sundance premiered the film in January 1992, where it became the most talked-about title and was picked up by Miramax. It opened in 19 US theatres that October and made about $2.8 million domestically, yet earned more than twice that in Britain, where it was denied a home-video release until 1995. Its reputation grew after Pulp Fiction, and Empire later crowned it the greatest independent film ever made.
Source: Reservoir Dogs
