ER Celebrates 30 Years: The Day Tarantino Directed an Episode

The first season of the cult medical series was marked by the surprise appearance of the director of Pulp Fiction behind the camera for one episode. A surreal experience that left its mark on the filmmaker. We’ll tell you all about it.

It’s a legendary series on the small screen. EMERGENCIES celebrates its 30th anniversary today. On September 19, 1994, the American network NBC broadcast the very first episode of this medical series by Michael Crichton, a tense and hyper-realistic drama, which would revolutionize the genre. A true phenomenon attracting tens of millions of curious people every week, EMERGENCIES also counted among his first fans a certain Quentin Tarantino.

As Chicago’s Cook County Hospital opens its doors, QT is a filmmaker at the height of his fame. He has just received the Palme d’Or at Cannes for pulp Fiction and presents himself as one of the most promising directors in Hollywood. And yet, to everyone’s surprise, he agrees to come and film a banal episode ofEMERGENCIES.

It is early spring of 1995. The medical series is wrapping up an exceptional first season. And Quentin Tarantino is preparing his next film, A Night in Hellwhich he will co-sign with Robert Rodriguez and in which he will play alongside a certain George ClooneyFilming is scheduled to take place that summer, after Clooney has wrapped season 1 ofEMERGENCIES. And while they’re preparing the scenes together, George tells his playmate about the medical series. He suggests that it would be fun if he did an episode!

A godsend for Universal, which will not hesitate for long. Quentin Tarantino is hired to shoot the 24th – and penultimate – episode of the first season ofEMERGENCIEStitled “Motherhood.” It is Lydia Woodward who wrote the episode in question, without knowing that the reigning Palme d’Or winner was going to come and direct it. She confided that after being informed of his arrival, she tried to make some scenes a little dirtier, bloodier, more Tarantino-esque…

The day of the shoot arrives. And Quentin Tarantino is having a blast. But he quickly becomes disillusioned, as he tells Gerald Peary in the book Conversations with filmmakers (published in 1998):

“I found it very interesting to shoot an episode of ER. Because I like the style of directing in ER, with a steadycam that spins around to make shots that last 4, 5, 6 minutes without editing. But at one point, the producer John Wells said he had a problem with a scene I had just filmed. He wanted me to do it again differently. No one has ever told me to do a scene differently! Never! So I asked John Wells to come see me so we could talk about it directly. Because I’m the type to give the benefit of the doubt… And then someone on the team told me: ‘It’s normal that no one ever tells you anything about your own films. They’re your films!’ And then I realized that it wasn’t my shoot, but their series! The producers’ series! Not the director’s. I come, I direct and I leave. Period. That’s how it is on TV: the producer is the boss, he’s the one with the vision. It’s the writers, who are also producers, who are in charge. And John Wells did it very well, by the way.”

Except that to avoid being completely erased behind production, Quentin Tarantino found a trick. A cheeky idea: film only one take of each sequence, to prevent the channel and the producers from tinkering with the episode during editing! It’s Julianna Margulies who revealed during a meeting of the elders ofEMERGENCIES, during the pandemic: “Quentin Tarantino came to direct us one day because he was such a fan of the show. He would only do one take and he would always say, ‘That’s it, let’s move on!’ When I asked him why he did that, he said, ‘Because that way, it’s going to be my version no matter what!’ So without any more takes, they didn’t have the opportunity to change the episode in post-production…”

For his work on EMERGENCIES, Quentin Tarantino received a modest fee of $30,000 from NBC. “Motherhood” was one of the most-watched episodes of that year on American television, with 33 million viewers.