For many moviegoers, there is pre- and post-Tarantino cinema. Before “Reservoir Dogs,” movies couldn’t be so brazenly self-referential up to the point that characters discussed pop culture like they were all the savviest kid in your friend circle. For those of us who wolfed down movies, music, books and the rest of it like a large deluxe pizza, early Tarantino validated our fixation; his successes made it seem possible for us to tell stories via our own referential patois. It sounds absurd now, but no one outside of scenarists like Daniel Waters and Shane Black dared to write like this.
Somewhere in between “Kill Bill” chapters, Hollywood types began wondering if Tarantino’s style of filmmaking had pigeonholed him to the point of self-parody. Factor in the countless Tarantino wannabes that began sprouting up in the mid-1990s, and it felt like the most daring thing the filmmaker could do would be to make a straightforward prestige drama. But just because other filmmakers were diluting his brand didn’t mean Tarantino had to abandon it altogether. If anything, pale imitations like “Love and a .45” and “Lucky Number Slevin” drove home the singular quality of his voice.
Who really wanted Tarantino to make movies that looked and sounded like every other cookie-cutter genre flick? Why, the folks whose job it was to make cookie-cutter genre flicks: Hollywood studios. And before Tarantino made it clear he was not for hire, the dream factory tried to lull him into nightmare of sameness.
Tarantino was offered Men in Black
In a 1997 interview with The New York Times, Tarantino revealed that he fielded offers from studios that wrongly assumed what he really wanted was to direct other people’s work. Of course, if he had taken this approach to the business, it probably would’ve worked out for him. According to Tarantino:
“After ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ I got a ton of offers from actors with production companies. And some things came my way. ‘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.”
Okay, maybe that version of “Speed” wouldn’t have gone on to gross $350 million worldwide like Jan de Bont’s masterful 1994 film. But if Tarantino had only cared about box office, the one that got away would’ve been a certain sci-fi action comedy that owned the summer of 1997. Per Tarantino, “[T]he other real big movie offered to me was ‘Men in Black.’ I never even read it.”
If he had, the answer almost assuredly would’ve been the same resounding no. “Men in Black” might’ve been the type of movie Tarantino could enjoy in a theater, but he would’ve wanted to tailor that script to his particular sensibilities, which ain’t exactly four quadrant. (Adjusted for inflation, Tarantino’s top grossing movie worldwide is “Django Unchained” at $586 million; “Men in Black” would’ve grossed $1.2 billion had it come out today.) Instead, Tarantino knocked out his best film to date in ’97 with “Jackie Brown.” Everybody won because you’d rather have the only man alive who can make Tarantino movies make Tarantino movies.
