We all know Steve Buscemi’s Reservoir Dogs character would have rather been called Mr. Purple than Mr. Pink. But as Joe Cabot pointed out, Mr. Purple was some other guy on some other job. So if we know Mr. Pink, Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, and Mr. Brown, what’s the identity of Mr. Purple? It turns out, it might be Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards.
As he tells Den of Geek, while studying film, Gareth Edwards decided to attend the Shots in the Dark festival in Nottingham. Also present was Quentin Tarantino, there to present his debut, Reservoir Dogs, to the UK. A big enough fan, he got QT to sign a postcard for him, before he and his friend debated over who got to try to squeeze next to him at a screening of the 1967 French film Le Samouraï. Tarantino, having an encyclopedic knowledge of film, had already seen it (heck, he was introducing it) and was evidently more interested in catching the reactions of Edwards and his friend.
If that wasn’t a surreal enough experience for Edwards, he approached Tarantino once again for an autograph. “I had bought a poster, and I put it down [because] he was signing stuff, and I said, ‘I already got something signed by you ‘to Gareth,’ so I was wondering, could you write something else?’ So he wrote ‘to Mr. Purple, aka Gareth.’ And I’m like ‘I’m officially Mr. Purple!’…He probably wrote ‘to Mr. Purple’ to about 10,000 people. It’s like George Lucas writing, ‘The Force is with you.’”
Whether or not Tarantino actually scribbled “Mr. Purple” on a bunch of Reservoir Dogs posters or not (I’ve never seen one online, but they could be out there), it’s cool he took the request and gave Edwards such a memorable experience. In an amusing epilogue to the story, he later spotted QT at a screening of his own Godzilla, more than 30 years after one of his idols was pitching Reservoir Dogs in his home country.
As for how Reservoir Dogs fared in the UK, the British Board of Film Classification pushed a delay on its VHS release due to the film’s violence, despite it being released theatrically.
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