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A familiar rite of passage in Hollywood is that when a director gains attention for an early, usually independent, movie or two, the major studios begin circling like vultures to hand them the reins on an expensive blockbuster. It did happen to Quentin Tarantino, but he wasn’t interested.
After Reservoir Dogs put him on the map and his screenwriting prowess gained further attention through True Romance and Natural Born Killers, he was the hottest rising talent in Tinseltown. History shows that many aspiring auteurs eventually succumb to the bright lights and massive budget of mass-marketed genre fare, but Tarantino was determined to stick to his guns.
Not many filmmakers have enjoyed a career quite like Tarantino’s after he simply refused to budge from his position of retaining full control. Sure, names like Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, and Yorgos Lanthimos have retained their freedom and continued making films that are distinctly and uniquely theirs, but the Pulp Fiction creator is on a level above.
He’s more in line with the Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, and Denis Villeneuve set; directors who operate with budgets typically reserved for franchise flicks and effects-heavy epics but crafted by a single-minded artist who makes exactly the kind of movie they’ve imagined in their heads realised on a grand scale.
When his sophomore feature completely altered the complexion of the American indie industry in the mid-1990s, Tarantino was a made man. Before that, though, he was being inundated with phone calls and inquiries from some of the heaviest hitters in the game, which saw him turn down one of the greatest action movies ever made.
“After Reservoir Dogs, I got a tonne of offers from actors with production companies, and some things came my way,” he admitted to The New York Times. “Speed was offered to me. Speed was originally supposed to be an independent-type action film. It’s hard to believe that now, but they used Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant as examples of the direction they were headed. It was supposed to be the same market.”
It’s a phenomenal film as it is, but Speed would have been a completely different proposition with Tarantino at the helm. The screenplay has its fair share of sparkling dialogue, witty interplay, and one-liners, but he would have undoubtedly stamped his own imprint on the material, and there’s a very high probability that it would have been less focused on jaw-dropping stunts in favour of exploring the key characters.
As a huge fan of the era and its biggest stars, Tarantino would have definitely gotten a kick out of directing Dennis Hopper as a scenery-chewing villain, but he never seriously contemplated selling out to take a huge studio gig right after Reservoir Dogs confirmed there was an audience and an appetite for the type of cinema he was dead-set on creating.
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