Quentin Tarantino Says RESERVOIR DOGS Co-Star Lawrence Tierney Was a "F***ing Lunatic" and Got Into a Fistfight With Him
Quentin Tarantino’s first feature film was the 1992 crime caper film Reservoir Dogs. This film is freakin’ great! I remember when I first watched that film, I had never seen anything like it before. The way it was written and the way the snappy dialogue was delivered by the actors was just so much damn fun!
Well, it turns out that the first week of shooting Reservoir Dogs was extremely rough for Tarantino because of one of the co-stars, Lawrence Tierney, who played Joe Cabot. He was the guy that brought the crew together.
Things were so heated during that week that it actually led to a fistfight between Tierney and Tarantino! In an interview with The Guardian, Tarantino recalled the experience saying:
"Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time - he just needed to be sedated. We had decided to shoot his scenes first, so my first week of directing was talking with this f**king lunatic.
"He was personally challenging to every aspect of film-making. By the end of the week everybody on set hated Tierney - it wasn't just me. And in the last 20 minutes of the first week we had a blow out and got into a fist fight. I fired him, and the whole crew burst into applause.
"And I thought: OK, now I'm going to get fired. That's it; that's my shot at being a director, gone, after one week."
In the end, he didn’t get fired thanks to legendary actor Harvey Keitel. He intervened to smooth things over with the studio. Tarantino went on to finish his fantastic first feature film.
I should also note that during the production of the film Tierney shot at his nephew in a drunken rage at his Hollywood apartment, and was arrested. He was released for a day from jail to continue filming,
Via: /Film