- CSI star George Eads recalled crying when he learned Quentin Tarantino would direct him being buried alive in the season 5 finale “Grave Danger.”
- Eads also remembered Tarantino directing him to “imagine your mother is watching you die” and singing him a nursery rhyme while they shot the scene.
- Tarantino separately shared that he “ripped off” the concept for the scene from the 1972 made-for-TV movie The Longest Night.
Lights, camera, burial.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation pulled off one of its most dramatic and memorable finales in 2005, when season 5 wound down with George Eads’ CSI Nick Stokes being buried alive. Looking back on “Grave Danger” 25 years after the series first went to air, Eads recently told GQ that he cried when he learned director Quentin Tarantino had plans for him six feet under.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he shared. “It was like it wasn’t real.”
Eads confessed to being a huge Tarantino fan prior to the legendary auteur taking the reins of the season 5 finale. But he kept it professional on set and kept his distance before commencing production on his big scene. “It was good because I think he maybe in a way respected that I didn’t [go all doe-eyed],” Eads reflected.
Once Eads did finally assume the position inside the explosive-lined glass coffin, he said he “begged” Tarantino for the kind of involved direction that TV directors can’t usually afford to provide on such tight schedules. “He directed me and cared enough to take the time and talk to me about what we were doing,” Eads reflected. “And nobody really does that.”
Tarantino certainly put his all into directing the scene, which involved Eads lying in a cramped, three-walled box with the fourth removed for the camera. “He leans over and he whispers in my ear, ‘On this one, I want you to imagine your mother is watching you die, saying goodbye,'” Eads recalled. “I said, ‘OK.’ So we hit record, and he starts going, while we’re rolling… ‘Hush little baby, don’t you cry.’ I get chills now just thinking about it.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Tarantino for comment.
In the two-part finale, Nick is abducted and shut into the coffin, which isn’t just lined with explosives, but cameras that relay his brutal plight to the rest of his team. The culprit turns out to be the disgruntled father of a girl implicated on a prior case the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s crime scene investigators handled.
Nick’s coffin is ultimately flooded with fire ants, causing him to scream in agony. But CSI lead Gil Grissom (William Petersen) just so happens to also possess an insect expertise, allowing him to identify Nick’s location and rescue him before the ants — or the bombs — finish him off.
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Rodin Eckenroth/Getty; Kevin Winter/Getty
In a Monday interview with TV Insider, CSI series creator Anthony Zuiker punnily referred to “Grave Danger” as “quint-essential.”
He shared, “You have Quentin Tarantino coming in to do television and putting his cinematic stamp on our franchise on one of the most iconic episodes of television ever produced. So, it really is the gold star of our franchise. If you’re to [look at] 911 episodes and choose the top three, it has to be in the conversation.”
Zuiker remembered the Reservoir Dogs director self-describing as a “huge fan” of CSI, and sketching out beat-for-beat the episodes that would become the season 5 finale during an informal spitballing session with the show’s writers.
“I remember like it was yesterday. He said, ‘If we buried Nick Stokes, and he was underground, and we found out that his father used to call him Poncho, but nobody knows that, and he’s full of explosives, six feet under with ants crawling around, and then we find him buried and we wipe the glass with the dirt, and Nick Stokes is freaking out, and if he moves, he’s going to blow us all to sky high. And then William Petersen says Poncho, and then Nick freezes because he knows that’s the father nickname… If we did that, Anthony, that would be pretty f—ing cool,'” Zuiker recalled.
Andrew Cooper/Sony
That’s exactly how “Grave Danger,” one of the series’ highest-rated episodes, did ultimately play out. Tarantino admitted to having “ripped off the imagery” from a 1972 made-for-TV movie called The Longest Night for the buried alive scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. For “Grave Danger,” he figured, “I should just actually rip off The Longest Night and then just take the idea of somebody buried underground as part of a ransom thing.”
Nick survived the ordeal, and Eads went on to play the tough yet tender investigator for the duration of the series’ 15 seasons on CBS.
