Samuel L. Jackson is still pissed he wasn’t cast to play a role in Reservoir Dogs.
Samuel L. Jackson sat down for an interview with Vulture to promote the new Quentin Tarantino movie The Hateful Eight.
Quentin Tarantino spoke at length about his distate for True Detective and how to cast for major motion pictures. But, Samuel L. Jackson’s interview wasn’t as exciting as hit KTLA interview several months ago but, there were some interesting highlights.
All of these interviews are to promote The Hateful Eight, which is the sixth movie that Quentin and Sam worked on together. Tim Roth steps into the discussion at one point to call Sam “Quentin’s leading man,” which is quite true. However, Samuel L. Jackson is still upset he wasn’t cast in Reservoir Dogs.
He’d shown up to casting for this unknown screenwriter’s first feature having memorized a scene he thought he’d be playing with Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel. Instead, he got stuck reading with two bozos he’d never seen before, who didn’t know their lines and couldn’t stop laughing. “I didn’t realize it was Quentin, the director-writer, and Lawrence Bender, the producer, but I knew that the audition was not very good.”
It wasn’t until Reservoir Dogs‘ notorious premiere at the Sundance Film Festival the following January that Jackson saw Tarantino again. Half the audience had fled amid all that gleeful gore; Jackson went up afterward to shake Tarantino’s hand. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember you. How’d you like the guy who got your part?’” says Jackson. “I was like, ‘Really? I think you would have had a better movie with me in it.’”
At that meeting, Quentin promised he was writing a role for Samuel L. Jackson, which was – of course – the iconic Jules of Pulp Fiction. Since then, a long-term working relationship was born. Samuel L. Jackson talked about how he and Quentin “have a kind of cinematic affinity,”so they regularly hold private movie nights at Quentin’s home theater. In fact, they both love kung-fu fighting movies and both enjoyed “comic-book-obsessed childhoods in Tennessee in the care of their grandparents.”
(Via Vulture)
