Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs' has no reservoir, no dogs, no use of the words "reservoir," or "dogs," or "reservoir dogs" at any point in the movie. Then how did he come up with the name "Reservoir Dogs"?
The story goes that when young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store , his distaste for fancy-pants European auteurs like Louis Malle manifested in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle's 'Au Revoir les Enfants' defeated him completely (oh reservoir les oh fuck) until he began to refer to it contemptuously as "those, oh, reservoir dogs." Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance.
[Read in the comically informative essay "Reservoir Frogs" in Salman Rushdie's essay collection 'Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992 2002']
