Why Quentin Tarantino Didn't Direct Three Of The Movies He Wrote
Quentin Tarantino has written every single movie he has directed, but he has also written three that he didn’t get to direct – here’s why. Tarantino’s career as a writer and filmmaker began in 1992 with the crime movie Reservoir Dogs, which followed a group of thieves whose planned heist of a jewelry store went terribly wrong, and to make matters worse, there was an undercover cop among them. Although Reservoir Dogs is considered one of the most influential independent movies of all time, his big break arrived two years later with another crime movie: Pulp Fiction.
Those first movies firmly established Tarantino’s visual and narrative style, along with his trademark doses of violence, and opened many doors for him in the movie industry. Tarantino has famously stated he will retire after making 10 movies, but when taking into account all those he has written, he has already passed that number – the trick here is, he hasn’t directed every single movie he has written. Instead, Tarantino has left the director chair to three different filmmakers to bring his stories to life, though he didn’t always like the final result.
First off is True Romance (1993), a romantic crime movie starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. The script of True Romance was Tarantino’s first for a major motion picture, but as he was still new in the film industry, he couldn’t direct True Romance and Reservoir Dogs and ended up losing interest in the former. The script for True Romance, then, was sold and landed on Tony Scott’s hands, who changed the non-linear narrative into a more traditional one, but according to Tarantino, the final result was very faithful to his original screenplay. However, the ending was changed, and while Tarantino wasn’t initially on board with that, after watching the movie he agreed that this ending was more appropriate to the movie Scott made.
Next was Natural Born Killers (1994), which he tried and failed to direct himself for $500,000, so he ended up selling the script to producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy, who then sold it to Warner Bros. The script caught the attention of Oliver Stone, who along with screenwriter David Veloz and associate producer Richard Rutowski rewrote it, to the point where it had little resemblance to the original one, so Tarantino only got a “story by” credit. Two years later, From Dusk till Dawn was released, directed by Tarantino’s friend Robert Rodriguez, and with Tarantino playing the character of Richie Gecko. In the early 1990s, Robert Kutzman hired Tarantino to write the script as his first paid writing assignment, and Tarantino was reportedly set to direct it but decided to focus on the story and playing Richie Gecko instead. After that, other directors were interested in bringing the story to life, but the big winner was Robert Rodriguez.
Funny enough, True Romance and From Dusk till Dawn are both considered as part of the “Tarantino movie universe”, with the former being part of the “realer than real” level and the latter of the “movie-in-a-movie” side, meaning that Clarence and Alabama watched the Gecko brothers fight some vampires at the cinema. It’s unknown if there are other Quentin Tarantino scripts that could potentially be directed by someone else, but it seems unlikely that would happen now as he’s already a big name in the film industry and can get the budget and everything he needs to make any movie he wants.