Quentin Tarantino Quit Watching Every TV Show He’s Directed
Quentin Tarantino has been fortunate enough to film a few episodes of some of his favorite television programs. But doing so seems to quickly ruin his enjoyment of the same shows he used to watch.
Quentin Tarantino once swore off shooting television show episodes
Tarantino has decided to lend his expertise in filmmaking to a couple of shows. He filled in as a guest director for the television series CSI in the 2000s. He helmed the two-parter season 5 finale “Grave Danger,” which he also ended up writing as well. He also faced little difficulty adapting to the limitations of network television than some might think, especially thanks to his admiration of the show.
“It wasn’t a challenge in that regard because … I like the show,” Tarantino once told Today. “I just wanted to do my episode of it. So the format was all the stuff I embrace. I just wanted it to be bigger, to feel in someway like a CSI movie.”
After Tarantino made public he was a fan of CSI, the television show’s producers jumped at the chance to recruit the filmmaker. Which provided the CSI cast with a bit of a morale boost.
“So when Quentin came on that set, everybody had a little pep in their step, excited to be at work,” a CSI actor said. “They were laughing and smiling. They loved being there and after five years, it was like the adrenaline shot that was in Pulp Fiction that the girl got in the chest. That was exactly what our set needed.”
But there was a drawback to Tarantino working on the small-screen. He learned after a while that he can’t help but distance himself entirely from the television shows he’s directed after getting too close to them.
“I’ve done it three times. I’ve directed an episode of ER. I’ve directed an episode of CSI and I acted in a couple of episodes of Alias. I did all of them because I was a big fan of the show. However, the weird by-product of it is after I got through doing the show, I never watched it again. I don’t know why. I guess I’ve invested in it so much I shut it off. If I like a show now I just want to keep liking it,” he once told Metro.
Quentin Tarantino backed out of directing one of his favorite modern shows at the last minute
There was a moment where Tarantino almost seemed to have a change of heart. The filmmaker has always been a fan of author Elmore Leonard, even directing one of the writer’s movie adaptations in Jackie Brown. So it makes sense that Tarantino has been keeping an eye on the television series Justified, a show that also adapted one of Leonard’s past works. The Pulp Fiction director felt Justified was a worthy interpretation of its source material.
Although he never directed an episode, there was an attempt to convince Tarantino to direct the series’ revival show Justified: City Primeval. Showrunner Michael Dinner tapped Tarantino to helm a couple of episodes with the help of the show’s star Timothy Olyphant. It seemed to be a done deal until an undisclosed problem derailed everyone’s plans.
“Probably about two weeks before he was supposed to start prep, [Quentin Tarantino] called up and said, ‘Look, I can’t do it for some private reasons,’” Dinner recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “So we had to scramble … Quentin was more of a cheerleader than anything else. He certainly was there in spirit. People who’ve done Elmore love doing Elmore, and he’s one of those people who completely understands Elmore’s work and Elmore’s world.”
