Quentin Tarantino explained that he prepared Reservoir Dogs using written shot lists. In his account of working with Andrzej Sekula, he noted that he did not use drawn storyboards and that he described the framing and camera movements he wanted to achieve. That testimony makes it possible to clarify what planning material can be attributed to the film.
A storyboard organises a sequence through panels; a shot list can handle part of that preparation in words. The director used writing to anticipate what the camera needed to do and then discussed the solutions with the director of photography. The result also depended on what the actors did within the space and on the time available to film it.
The concentration of conversations in the warehouse makes that preparation especially important. Listening to someone may involve looking at the person speaking, watching a reaction, or keeping several people within the same frame. Planning the scene requires deciding which relationship needs to be shown at each moment. Interviews and the script directions offer examples of that work without needing to assume a collection of original sketches.
The answer about the storyboards is in Tarantino’s own testimony. In an interview conducted in Cannes and published by Positif in September 1992, reproduced in the December 2022 Blu-ray Downlow review of Reservoir Dogs, he explained that he did not draw them: he prepared detailed shot lists and compared his proposals with Sekula. He described the camera’s position and movement in writing.
Written planning before filming
A shot list makes it possible to organise the images needed to cover a scene. It can indicate who appears, from where they are seen, and when the framing changes. The description focuses on a filming task; the storyboard adds a graphic representation. They are different documents, although both can help to think about the relationship between an action and the camera.
Tarantino explained another aspect of that preparation to Paul Zimmerman in his 1992 interview for Orbit, preserved by Quentin Tarantino Fan Club. He said that he had written the chase shot by shot. The example shows that some visual decisions could already be built into the script, before being separated out into a specific tool for filming.
The version dated 22 October 1990, reproduced on IMSDb, contains notes on point of view and movement. In the section covering Pink’s escape, for example, it suggests following the run with the camera. That direction describes a written intention. To determine what survives in a released film, the edit has to be observed, because an earlier script can also contain actions or solutions that are changed later.
The pages and the interviews therefore provide evidence of visual preparation. By themselves, they do not identify a sheet that later circulates as original material. A drawing based on a frame can reconstruct a shot precisely and still remain a later interpretation. Its date and provenance are necessary to know what relationship it has to the production work.
Deciding what to watch during a conversation
Planning becomes especially challenging in the Reservoir Dogs warehouse: much of the action consists of speaking and listening. The camera can keep two men in the image so that an accusation and its reply share the same space. It can also move in on one and leave the other’s voice off-screen. Those choices change where the viewer looks for information.
An intervention does not require an immediate change of shot. Sometimes the listener’s reaction explains the situation better than the speaker’s face. Keeping Orange lying within the composition also recalls an urgency that the others may be putting off. The image retains information even when the dialogue is dealing with something else.
The written lists could anticipate that division of attention, but the work with Sekula made it possible to discuss other solutions. The collaboration described by Tarantino leaves space between the initial idea and the realised image: a proposal can be revised because another position or movement makes the relationship between the actors clearer. Knowledge of the location and the performance adds conditions that the preparation must turn into practical decisions.
The film makes it possible to study the result of those decisions; the testimonies explain part of the process. The difference matters when looking for its storyboards: the material documented by the director is planning through words, developed in dialogue with the crew. The precision of the final framing does not require every image to have existed beforehand as a drawn panel.
A dialogue scene makes the preparation clear even when the camera stays still. What matters is who enters the frame, what distance they keep from another character, and what happens while they listen. Stillness can preserve a power relationship that a shot change would separate. Observing that distribution helps explain what kind of decisions the shot list had to solve.
It is also worth distinguishing the narrative sequence from the order of work. A list can organise what needs to be filmed without yet expressing the final duration of each image. The edit uses the material obtained to decide when a reaction lingers and when further information arrives. For that reason, describing a framing is not enough to reconstruct its full function.
Reservoir Dogs is useful for studying that continuity between writing, filming and editing. The words anticipate an image, the actors occupy the space, and the film determines how long we see it. Each stage adds concrete conditions to preparation that the director had begun in writing.