10 Directors Who Were PISSED OFF At Film Premieres
2. Quentin Tarantino's First Ever Premiere Was A "F**king Disaster" - Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut Reservoir Dogs is one of the most successful premieres in the history of the Sundance Film Festival, immediately becoming the talk of the town and ensuring Tarantino became a filmmaker to watch.
But much of the buzz was drummed up through repeat screenings at Sundance, as its actual, original premiere screening was a "f**king disaster" by the director's own admission:
"That was a disaster. That's kind of famous actually. There's so many things about this movie that I didn't know anything so if I could do it all over again, I'd do things slightly differently, but one of the main ones is at our very first public screening they didn't have a scope lens for the projector, and it's a scope movie. And I let them show it anyway because I didn't know that you couldn't. So it looks like caca all the way through.
That would be bad enough, but then it gets to the final climax, where everyone is yelling at each other in the final chapter, and all of a sudden the lights come up. And somebody realizes, 'Oh s**t what's going on.' So they bring the lights down. Then finally everyone has their guns pointed on everybody else and almost, as if on purpose, as far as suspense is concerned, right at the height of that scene there's a power outage, and all the power goes out. So I was like, 'OK this is what it is like to watch your movie in public.' It was a f**king disaster."
As if debuting your first movie at one of the world's most prestigious film festivals isn't stressful enough, Tarantino had to deal with all this.
Thankfully, that cataclysmic first screening did little to dent the film's momentum at Sundance, as it was promptly acquired by Miramax Films, and the rest is history.