Quentin Tarantino has worked with English actors like Tim Roth on several occasions. Still, the filmmaker felt he had a solid ear for accents, and could tell when non-American actors sounded off. This would later affect the way he worked with Roth and other non-American performers.
Quentin Tarantino felt non-American actors lost their charm without their natural accents
Tarantino and Roth started collaborating under unique circumstances. The filmmaker famously cast Roth as the Reservoir Dogs character Mr. Orange, but only after a night out of heavy drinking. When a much more sober Tarantino realized what he’d done, he soon thought he made a grave mistake.
“Tim and I go to a bar, The Coach And Horses on Sunset where he hangs out, and we’re drinking and drinking and we get ripped. I mean just smashed. It’s 2:00 in the morning now and we’re both ripped on our ass,” Tarantino once told Josh Becker. “Basically, in a drunken stupor I gave him the part. And then, after I gave him the part, I saw Vincent & Theo and I hated him in it. He was awful! He was the worst! Oh my God! What do I do? I gave him the part, I’ve got to be a man of my word, and…He was OK in [Reservoir Dogs].”
Casting Roth turned out to be one of Tarantino’s best mistakes, as the two went on to collaborate a few more times after Dogs. But Tarantino directed Roth a bit differently than he did in his debut feature. Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight both have Roth speaking with his natural accent rather than the American voice he used for Dogs. This was a deliberate decision Tarantino made which he repeated with other non-American performers like Zoë Bell.
“But frankly a lot of these New Zealand actors and Australian actors lose a lot of their charm,” Tarantino once told Metro. “They lose a lot of the music in their voices when they have to do these American accents. Some of these poor actors haven’t talked in their own voice for 10 years. Sometimes it doesn’t really even make sense. They could have absolutely used their own accents. Zoë has such an effervescence with her New Zealand why would you not use it?”
This was Tarantino’s core reason for letting Roth speak in his true tone.
“Tim Roth has an American accent in Reservoir Dogs but every other time I’ve used him he’s always been British,” he said.
Tim Roth was angry that Quentin Tarantino almost shelved ‘The Hateful Eight’
Pulp Fiction almost became the last time the Oscar winner collaborated with Roth. After completing the script for The Hateful Eight, the filmmaker was all ready to bring his cast together for the big screen. But after the script for the movie leaked in 2014, a furious Tarantino ended up shelving the project. Roth joked about the script leak on a phone call with Tarantino. He maintained innocence that he had nothing to do with the movie falling into the wrong hands.
“It never left my kitchen table actually. My kids weren’t even allowed to read it and they really wanted to read it. I’m quite loyal like that. But I got really pissed off – because to work with Quentin again after all those f***ing years… I was like, ‘No,’” Roth recalled to The Scotsman.
Roth was sure it wasn’t a bluff on Tarantino’s part, either.
“Oh that was real. The thing about Quentin is he’s genuine about stuff like that. He said, ‘I’m done.’ And I was like, ‘Don’t do that. What an awful thing to let someone else dictate what you’re gonna make.’ Then he re-wrote it. But it’s a really good script that first one. We did it as a play,” he added.
But it turned out The Hateful Eight would see the light of day after all. Roth theorized that Tarantino cherished his work too much to keep it from the big screen.
“He probably thought, ‘Oh this is good. I can do this,’” Roth said.
