  Quentin Tarantino, left, directs William Petersen in the season finale of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, airing tomorrow.
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Everyone wants to know the gory details about how Quentin Tarantino came to direct tomorrow's two-hour season finale of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Turns out it's as simple as this: The Pulp Fiction auteur is a follower of TV's highest-rated show, which wraps up its fifth season at 9 p.m. on CTV and CBS with the Tarantino-directed two-hour Grave Danger -- subtitled Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in honour of his Kill Bill films.
"We heard he was a fan of the show," creator and executive producer Anthony E. Zuiker recalls.
So star William Petersen, also one of the executive producers, contacted the filmmaker (whose last TV work was appearing as a villain on Alias) about helming an episode.
"He came up with the story and then we co-wrote the finale," Zuiker explains, adding that fans of Tarantino's work will nevertheless recognize the director's touch. "We have some of that great Tarantino dialogue."
In the episode, one of the CSI team members -- investigator Nick Stokes -- is buried alive while his colleagues race to save him.
The episode, originally conceived as a single hour, grew to two hours -- and Zuiker won't say whether or not it ends on a cliffhanger.
What's not a mystery is how much Tarantino enjoyed himself making it. "It wasn't a challenge in that regard because ... I like the show," says Tarantino who directed a 1995 episode of ER.
"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."
He says he's "fascinated by the whole forensic thing" and adds Petersen's chief criminologist Gil Grissom is his favourite TV character -- "the best detective to come along since Columbo."
Not that this is especially surprising when you consider both the show's creators and Tarantino seem to have a mutual affinity for severed body parts (one that saw Tarantino butt heads with CBS censors at least once).
For Zuiker -- who was a tram operator at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, shuttling tourists from the parking lot, when he wrote the pilot script for CSI -- landing Tarantino as a guest director is just the latest accomplishment for a show (fittingly set in Vegas) that has been on a roll since its debut.
Zuiker himself is now the showrunner of the second spinoff, CSI: NY, which followed CSI: Miami. The Sun spoke to him while he was in Canada promoting the latest CSI tie-in -- the CSI: Miami board game, which follows last year's launch of the first CSI board game.
"I think since 9/11 the board game industry has really come around full force because you can get together with your family or friends and play a board game and it's a lot of fun -- good clean fun," Zuiker says, adding that both the producers and network are aware of the dangers of overexposure.
"There's definitely a concern that three CSIs is enough."
As for Tarantino, the director recently told TV Guide that there's another reason -- beside his love of the show -- why he felt compelled to direct CSI. He's apparently mulling creating his own television series.
"I'm interested in doing a show of my own," he told the magazine.
"This was testing the water. There are some ideas that I've had for movies that are too long. Most people aren't down with four hour movies. But TV has caught up with my aspirations."
-- with files from AP
