WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Quentin Tarantino decamped to Amsterdam in March 1992, using the city as a European base for his promotion duties on Reservoir Dogs. Holed up in a flat without a telephone, he hung out in hash bars by night and gorged on obscure French gangster films by day. Not surprisingly, the latter bled into the screenplay he’d been paid a cool $1 million by Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films to produce. “The plan was to write a crime anthology,” the large-chinned helmer remembers. “But when I sat down, I saw there waꦓs much more gold there. It would be neat to have three separate stories, but have the same characters floating in and out.”