Be that as it may, it had a profound impact on Edwards’ own adolescence, decades before he would go on to make plenty of blockbuster movies set in the worlds of his own childhood favorites—worlds like Godzilla, Star Wars, and even Jurassic Park, as seen in this holiday weekend’s new release, Jurassic World Rebirth. Yet each of them featured an added sense of gravity and sobriety compared to what came previously. Consider the weight of Ken Watanabe saying “let them fight” in 2014’s Godzilla, or Rogue One being the only Star Wars film where most of the good guys die.
Before any of that, however, Edwards was a kid in the ‘90s who had his mind blown by Tarantino’s first movie. It would also prove serendipitous since before becoming a professional filmmaker, he would get a chance to meet QT in a fateful encounter where young Edwards would be christened… Mr. Purple.
The name should be familiar to anyone who’s seen Reservoir Dogs, a picture where a band of professional criminals get together to do a job. In the film, they’re wisely encouraged not to share their real names, so they instead go by color-coded aliases: Mr. Orange and Mr. White, Mr. Brown and Mr. Blond, and then of course there’s Mr. Pink—a moniker Steve Buscemi’s wiseacre malcontent fights like hell from being called.
“Why am I Mr. Pink?” Buscemi famously whines. “Why not Mr. Purple? That sounds good to me.” The cantankerous answer from his boss is he can’t be Mr. Purple. There’s some other guy on another job who’s Mr. Purple already.
And for a while there in Edwards’ young mind, he was that other guy. At least this was one takeaway from his meeting Tarantino at a Nottingham film festival while in university. At the time, Tarantino had come to town to screen his still quasi-forbidden Reservoir fruit in the UK, but he also was hanging around at cafes, talking shop, and watching any and everything else with a bunch of slackjawed film nerds—including Edwards and his mates.
“I just got in the car and I went up to Nottingham and I just booked tickets for the next movie that was on,” Edwards reminisces with a smile. “It was Le Samourai, this French film, and we were just hanging out in the lobby, and there [Tarantino] was.” By his own sheepish admission, the future Rogue One director was geeky enough to get Tarantino to sign a postcard before Le Samourai started. And afterward, when he and a pal realized there were two seats left open in the auditorium next to the Reservoir Dogs director, it became a battle of wills over who would sit next to QT.
