The Tarantino connection operates differently. Pulp Fiction used him in a tiny role — a cameo, essentially. Reservoir Dogs gave him Mr. Pink, a character defined by a particular kind of self-aware criminality: Mr. Pink knows he is in over his head, knows that the professional code he espouses is largely performative, and knows that his best chance of survival is to be, in his own terms, a professional. Buscemi plays all of this simultaneously, making Mr. Pink simultaneously funny and genuine.
His directing work runs alongside the acting in ways that illuminate his sensibility. Trees Lounge, which he wrote and directed in 1996, is a film about a man in his thirties — a mechanic who has lost his job and his girlfriend and who spends his days in the local bar — that is distinctively local in its geography (Valley Stream, Long Island, the suburb of Buscemi’s own childhood) and genuinely unsentimental in its characterization. The film does not want you to like its protagonist more than the evidence warrants. It wants you to recognize him. That quality — the refusal of false sympathy without the substitution of contempt — marks Buscemi’s directorial work as it marks his acting. He does not play villains for easy menace or losers for easy pathos. He plays people.
Animal Factory (2000), which he directed but did not write, is a prison film based on Edward Bunker’s novel of the same name. It starred Willem Dafoe and Edward Furlong, and it brought to the prison genre the same quality Trees Lounge had brought to the barroom drama: a sense that the world of the film is inhabited by people with histories, rather than by archetypes moved through plot requirements.