Charleston Daily Mail 19.05.2005

Tarantino a fan before directing ‘CSI’ finale: Series concludes fifth season with two-hour finale conceived by director
LOS ANGELES Unlike criminal investigator Nick Stokes, whos buried alive in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation season finale, Quentin Tarantino didnt feel at all trapped by working within the confines of network television. It wasnt a challenge in that regard because . . . I like the show, says Tarantino, who conceived and directed the episode. I just wanted to do my episode of it. So the format was all the stuff I embrace. I just wanted it to be bigger, to feel in some way like a CSI movie. TVs top-rated program concludes its fifth season Thursday (8 p.m. Eastern) with Tarantinos two-hour Grave Danger, subtitled Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in homage to his most recent feature project, Kill Bill, released in two parts. Tarantino, who rose to auteur prominence with 1994s audacious Pulp Fiction, has seen every episode of CSI many watched while shooting Kill Bill in Beijing, where he says the series played on what was called the Adrenaline Channel at 6 p.m. on Sunday his day off. Like much of the CSI audience, hes fascinated by the whole forensic thing. And head criminologist Gil Grissom (William Petersen) is his favorite TV character the best detective to come along since Columbo. Tarantinos unabashed admiration for the series led to his doing this seasons last show. Word spread like wildfire that Quentin Tarantino was watching and we all took such pride in that, and eventually we started to think if hes such a big fan, why dont we ask him to write and direct a show, says executive producer/writer Carol Mendelsohn. Petersen called the filmmaker, who immediately accepted. Working with the shows writing team, Tarantino came up with a script that originally was supposed to be one hour. But as filming started, it became clear there was enough material to fill two. Mendelsohn describes Tarantinos mood while shooting as pure joy. Theres nothing he would rather be doing . . . and when you see him bring such wide- eyed enthusiasm and energy and love for his job, you just say I know why I do this! Veteran character actor John Saxon, picked by Tarantino to guest-star as the criminal mastermind in the finale, also was taken with the directors spirit. Tarantino says he chose Saxon because his favorite episodes of CSI have Grissom matching wits with another mastermind . . . I needed a big sequence in the middle with him and Grissom facing each other like (Robert) DeNiro and (Al) Pacino in the middle of Heat. I needed an actor who could really hold his own against Billy (Petersen) in that kind of situation and John Saxon is the only actor to ever steal a movie from Marlon Brando, a reference to the 1966 Western The Appaloosa. Any one of the criminal investigation team could have been chosen to be the buried-alive victim, but Mendelsohn gave the job to Eads because I didnt think anyone had more raw emotion inside of them at this point than George. I felt that he had something that needed to come out. Tarantino couldnt agree more. It was just kind of perfect for this character, where he falls in the surrogate family, the director says. Hes kind of the bastard stepchild. Grissom has never really given it to him 100 percent they did an episode at one point about that so it was perfect to see him now as the son who has never quite got the attention, but now they maybe are going to lose him and they realize how valuable he is.

BRIDGET BYRNE