When Quentin Tarantino Revealed How This Stanley Kubrick Classic Inspired His Iconic Debut With Reservoir Dogs

Discover how this classic Stanley Kubrick movie inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and shaped the now-iconic filmmaker’s debut.

- May 15, 2025 | 6:36 PM IST

Which Stanley Kubrick Movie Inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs? ( Photo Credit – Wikimedia; Instagram )

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the industry. He has given the world some of the most commendable cinematic works, whether Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But even a filmmaker as bold and unique as Tarantino had his influences. And one of the biggest? Stanley Kubrick. Specifically, Kubrick’s 1956 film The Killing played a huge role in shaping how Tarantino approached his own debut, Reservoir Dogs.

Released in the mid-1950s, The Killing marked a turning point in Kubrick’s career. Until then, he had only made a few smaller films, but The Killing was his first real entry into Hollywood filmmaking. The story, adapted from the novel Clean Break by Lionel White, follows a group of men planning and carrying out a racetrack heist. Kubrick’s telling of the story set it apart: it didn’t follow a straight timeline. Instead, the film jumped around in time, showed the same event from multiple perspectives, and kept the audience on their toes.

For its time, that kind of structure was groundbreaking. Stanley Kubrick didn’t just tell a heist story but elevated the entire genre with his breakthrough film. It’s no wonder that decades later, it left such a strong impression on a then-young filmmaker named Quentin Tarantino.

When Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992, it caught fire with critics and audiences. But what many didn’t know at the time was how deeply Kubrick’s The Killing had influenced it. In an interview with The Seattle Times, Tarantino admitted, “I didn’t go out of my way to do a rip-off of The Killing, but I did think of it as my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie.”

Tarantino even called it his favorite heist film during Reservoir Dogs’ premiere at Cannes. “The Killing is my favorite heist film, and I was definitely influenced by it,” the filmmaker candidly shared, as retrieved via Far Out.

So while Reservoir Dogs may have felt like something entirely new when it dropped in the early ’90s, it was also carrying the inspiration from a film that came nearly 40 years earlier. The Killing helped shape Quentin Tarantino’s voice and, in turn, helped shape some of the most critical works of cinema that we know of today.