By Koraljka Suton
In the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino and his friend Roger Avary came up with an intriguing idea for a short film, but soon realized that no one would be willing to produce a short. Inspired by Mario Bava’s 1963 Italian horror Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura), an anthology film consisting of three separate stories, they decided to write a feature-length three-parter of their own. The two writers took it upon themselves to pen a section each, with the third story waiting for another potential filmmaker. But that person never appeared. It was, therefore, up to Tarantino to draft the third one himself. In his own words: “I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don’t: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story…I’m using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry.” While staying at his mom’s, he spent three and a half weeks writing but instead of focusing on the idea he and Avary had concocted, Tarantino began hearing “a set of bizarre criminal characters speaking to him”, as was reported in Mark Seal’s 2013 Vanity Fair piece entitled ‘Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction’. These characters ultimately became the protagonists of Reservoir Dogs, a script Tarantino started working on then and there, thus departing from the plan he had had with his co-writer. But only for the time being. Pulp Fiction was yet to have its moment.
Having made $50,000 on Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino jumped on a plane with a suitcase full of crime novels in early 1992 and flew to Amsterdam where he stayed in a one-room apartment for a couple of months, with no fax or telephone, working on the script for Pulp Fiction: “I just had this cool writing existence. I didn’t have to worry about money (…) I would get up and walk around Amsterdam, and then drink like 12 cups of coffee, spending my entire morning writing.” By the time Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 1992, Tarantino had already filled a handful of notebooks. Seeing as how his directorial debut had become the movie on everyone’s lips, Hollywood producers began offering Tarantino screenplays for him to direct. But the filmmaker only remained interested in both writing and directing the project he had temporarily abandoned and was now passionately invested in.
He returned to Amsterdam after the festival, along with Avary and Hollywood executive producer Stacey Sher and the three of them shared the aforementioned one-bedroom apartment. Before leaving Amsterdam, Sher was acquainted with the entire first act. According to her, Tarantino and Avary stayed to work on the second one together and after a while, the latter left Amsterdam feeling as if the two of them had co-written the screenplay. But Tarantino wasn’t of the same opinion. The auteur remained in Amsterdam, sprucing up Avary’s part and continued working on the script until January 1993, while making rounds on the European festival circuit. TriStar Pictures were supposed to finance the film, but studio chief Mike Medavoy passed, deeming it too violent, too demented and, ultimately, unfilmable. The script was picked up by Miramax (the first project greenlit after Disney had acquired the studio) and during filming, Avary was allegedly asked to settle for a “story by” credit, instead of a co-writer one. Tarantino claimed that Avary’s only contribution was the second story (for which he was supposedly paid $25,000), but that the script itself wasn’t actually co-written by him. Avary reportedly wasn’t on board with this demand, until Tarantino threatened to do away with his portion of the story, which would leave him with nothing. Avary eventually agreed and received a cut of the movie’s profits but claims today that he doesn’t remember any of this. The two went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay—the sole win out of a total of seven nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (John Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson), Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman) and Best Editing).
And needless to say, the win was well-deserved. Because one of the many reasons why Pulp Fiction is widely regarded as a postmodern classic, lies in the brilliance of its screenplay. In true postmodern fashion, Pulp Fiction plays with narrative structure, presenting us with three interconnected storylines told out of chronological order and centering on a different protagonist each. The film opens with a title card that offers us two definitions of the word ‘pulp’ taken from the American Heritage Dictionary, signifying the film’s self-reflexive nature off the bat. “1. a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter”, reads the first definition. “2. a magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.”, states the second one. The latter i.e., the pulp fiction that the film’s title references, refers to what is usually considered low-brow fiction. The very same low-brow fiction that inspired Tarantino’s violent, yet highly praised and acclaimed screenplay and its seedy antagonists. The very same low-brow fiction that Tarantino pays ultimate homage to, thus exhibiting yet another postmodern trait—tearing down the wall that stands between high- and low-brow art. Having worked in a video store and being and avid consumer of all kinds of motion pictures, Tarantino (and Avary) deliberately drew upon three clichés that were extremely common in the cinematic adaptations of stories that came out in pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.
The first narrative thread revolves around, as Tarantino himself described it while naming the trope, “the Mob guy who’s supposed to take the boss’s wife out for the evening”. After finishing a bloody job for his boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), Vincent Vega (John Travolta) is tasked with showing Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) a good time while her husband is out of town. Although the two share palpable chemistry, Vincent is well aware of what happens to men who dare get at all physical with Marsellus Wallace’s wife. After granting us with highly eclectic, yet memorable dialogue and one of the most famous movie dance scenes, both a homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part and an unexpected juxtaposition to all the violence that preceded it and all the violence that will inevitably follow it, Vincent and Mia head to her place. While he tries talking himself into leaving, she overdoses on heroin she found in the pocket of his jacket.
The second story (the one that Avary worked on) is centered around the bromide Tarantino called “the boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and doesn’t”. Butch (Bruce Willis) is the washed-up prizefighter who takes a bribe from Marsellus Wallace in return for losing a match in the fifth round. Butch not only bets the money on himself and wins the fight, but also ends up killing his opponent in the process. The plan to skip town with his girl Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros, a Portuguese actress Tarantino met while doing the European festival circuit with Reservoir Dogs) is in motion, but Butch encounters a slight hiccup in the form of a gold watch Fabienne forgot to pack. Knowing very well that rarely does one double-cross Marsellus Wallace and live to tell the tale, Butch decides that the sentimental value of and personal meaning ascribed to the gold watch outweigh the potential trouble he is more than likely about to get himself into.
The third storyline puts an emphasis on Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), Vincent Vega’s (literal) partner in crime, who experiences an epiphany after miraculously avoiding an encounter with the Grim Reaper while on the job. Jules sees this as a clear act of God and decides to change his ways—but he and Vincent must first get rid of the remains of an associate, scattered all over their car. This storyline also introduces us to a classic example of a MacGuffin, an object or a device that moves the plot forward, but turns out to be irrelevant in and of itself—a suitcase belonging to Marsellus Wallace that Vincent and Jules are tasked with retrieving. Although we see an otherworldly glow when the case is opened (courtesy of two batteries and a lightbulb), we never find out what’s in it and it ends up not mattering at all. Its sole significance is that it exists and requires to be returned to Marsellus Wallace, putting both Vincent and Jules on their respective paths. The fan theories regarding its contents range from diamonds to Marsellus Wallace’s soul (the combination on the briefcase is ‘666’, seen by some fans as a clear indicator that he had made a literal deal with the Devil), with Tarantino himself saying that the briefcase contains whatever the viewers want it to contain.
The achronological storytelling of Pulp Fiction sandwiched between an unforgettable diner scene starring Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), brings with it a myriad of unexpected surprises, turning Tarantino’s film into an inspired mosaic, at the same time extremely violent and unbelievably funny. Filled to the brim with homages to other films (in the words of publisher and critic Gary Groth: “Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac—he literally can’t help himself.”), Pulp Fiction is not only a love letter to the seventh art, but also an exquisitely written piece of cinema. The dialogue is highly eclectic and is rarely used as a means of exposition—and even when it is, this is done in a unique way that primarily serves the purpose of revealing the protagonists to us, instead of just filling us in on what is going on. In other words, dialogue is used to showcase the characters’ thoughts on and feelings about a variety of subject matters. The effect is two-fold: on the one hand, we see and feel them as full-fledged human beings, as opposed to mere cardboard cut-outs. Take Vincent and Jules for example, two criminals who are, in their perspective, regular co-workers who talk and act as such. While they are in transit or forced to wait before “getting into character” (as all people do when putting their professional masks on, no matter their line of work), they converse in ways co-workers do. But on the other hand, this creates a sort of cognitive dissonance in the viewers’ minds, because it ingeniously lulls us into a false sense of normalcy and safety, only to pull the rug out from under our feet. After all, we don’t expect casual, matter-of-fact conversations between work partners about, for instance, the nomenclature of hamburgers to gradually culminate in a rain of bullets. Whereas for them that’s just another Tuesday.
Incidentally, the concepts of redemption and forgiveness play a major part in Tarantino’s violent and uncompromising picture. And in the high-stakes world of Pulp Fiction, forgiveness implies allowing another person to live. Marsellus spares Butch’s life because the boxer saved his. Jules shows mercy on Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (something he clearly wouldn’t have done before his epiphany) after being granted a second shot at life, by none other than God himself (if you ask Jules). Vincent resuscitates Mia, resulting in the film giving him time. Time that is eventually cut short the moment he says yes to the job of killing Butch. But Jules, having walked out on the mob life after walking out of the diner where he had just spared the two robbers, doesn’t join Vincent on his latest (and last) assignment. And he survives. In other words, it is only after regaining that which was of infinite value to the characters, namely their own lives, that they were able to give others another chance to live. In the unforgiving, brutal world of such men, nothing less than that would have sufficed.
Pulp Fiction also did wonders for its fantastic cast. Travolta’s career was in the gutter—a string of either commercial or critical failures (or both) sidelined his career in the 1980s, resulting in the Academy Award-nominated actor (Saturday Night Fever) no longer being an A-lister. That is, until Tarantino came along and resurrected his career, offering him the role of Vincent Vega after Michael Madsen (who played Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs) turned it down in favor of Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp, a decision he came to regret. To prepare for the role of a heroin addict, Travolta decided to spend time with a street addict, as well as a former addict, with the latter instructing him on how to simulate a heroin high: “Drink as much tequila as you can and lay in a warm pool or tub of water.” As far as the role of Mia was concerned, actresses such as Meg Ryan, Rosanna Arquette, Holly Hunter and Michelle Pfeiffer were all up for the part, but Tarantino set his sights on Uma Thurman. And although the then 23-year-old had been making films since 1987, Pulp Fiction was the project that catapulted her into stardom. She was hesitant at first (unsure of whether she wanted to be in a film that depicts male rape), but after spending hours talking to the director, Thurman was ultimately sold on the project.
Being cast in Pulp Fiction also brought international acclaim to Samuel L. Jackson, but the role of Jules almost got away. When Tarantino told Jackson that he had written the part specifically for him, the actor approached his audition as if it were a reading (because Tarantino had told him as much), only to find out that he might lose to Paul Calderón. Jackson returned for a second audition and knocked it out of the park. Ving Rhames, who played Marsellus Wallace, got the part after Max Julien had turned it down, reportedly because he didn’t want to do the scene where his character is raped. But Rhames turned out to be the only one who didn’t have an issue with it (“He was very alone in his unconcern. It was a sheer mark of his masculinity.”, said Tarantino), claiming that he never got a chance to play a vulnerable character because of his appearance. His fantastic portrayal of Marsellus Wallace resulted in him getting roles in box-office hits like Mission Impossible (1996), Con Air (1997) and Out of Sight (1998). The actor whose career didn’t need saving was Bruce Willis, quite the contrary—the fact that he was a bankable star gave the film legitimacy. In Tarantino’s words: “Bruce Willis made us legit. Reservoir Dogs did fantastic internationally, so everyone was waiting for my new movie. And then when it was my new movie with Bruce Willis, they went apeshit.”
Apeshit they sure as hell went. Grossing an astonishing $213.9 million at the box office, on a $8–8.5 million budget, Pulp Fiction set a precedent for independent movies, being the first one to “break the $100 million barrier”, according to David A. Landay. In doing so, Tarantino’s hit directly affected how indie films were made throughout the remainder of the 1990s. Out of the 145 award nominations it received, it garnered a total of seventy wins, including two BAFTAs (out of nine nods), one Golden Globe (out of six nominations) and the Palme d’Or at the 47th Cannes Film Festival. It has since appeared on a variety of critics’ lists of the greatest films ever made and in 2013, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. And despite it all, this is what Tarantino told Mark Seal that very same year: “I’m not the kind of guy that wants to put Pulp Fiction into perspective 20 years later. One of the things I’m proudest about is I went out to make an omnibus movie, three separate stories. Then I wanted to make it so it would actually work together to tell one story. And I did that.” Mission accomplished, indeed. And then some.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
“When I start writing, I know more or less where I’m going. It’s not like I have a map, but instead as if I were following tips that a friend had given me for my itinerary and that I had noted down. You go by McDonald’s, and then you drive for a few miles and then you see a big tree. Then you know you’re going in the right direction. Then you get to a mountain with a sculpture carved in the rock, so you have to turn left. You go over several hills, and finally you reach a very long stone bridge. This analogy is a pretty good indication of how I work: with a series of markers.”—Quentin Tarantino, interviewed by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for Positif magazine at Cannes, 1994
Screenwriter must-read: Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s screenplay for Pulp Fiction [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
WHEN YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS
Interview conducted by Gavin Smith, taken from Film Comment, July/August 1994, 32-43.
~ ~ ~
It may be that writer-director and sometime actor Quentin Tarantino is to videostore clerks what the French nouvelle vague, Peter Bogdanovich, and Paul Schrader were to several generations of movie critics—proof that it’s possible not only to slip through the looking glass of film history and go from spectator to participant, but also to have a decisive influence on that history in the process. Tarantino’s 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs will, I think, prove pivotal in the history of the American independent film, for legitimizing its relationship to Hollywood genre.
Tarantino’s new film Pulp Fiction consolidates his reconciliation of the American hardboiled pulp tradition since the forties with the post-Pop idiom that dates from the sixties. Films like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983) anticipate Tarantino’s sardonic contemporary pop-pulp fusion, and share Los Angeles/Hollywood coordinates and drug-culture comic elements. But unlike either Altman or McBride, Tarantino ultimately redeems genre morally; even in Reservoir Dogs‘ world of simulation and identity-projection, betrayal is still betrayal. Pulp Fiction attaches scant irony to the conceit of a professional killer’s spiritual conversion and renunciation of crime.
Far from succumbing to easy cynicism, Tarantino achieves the remarkable feat of remaining a genre purist even as his films critique, embarrass, and crossbreed genre. Like the critics-turned-directors named above, Tarantino can’t or won’t entirely go native; instead he retains both the sensibility of the profound cinephile and a palpable, almost innocent faith in cinema, a movie idealism that frees him to approach writing and directing on one level as an almost intoxicating play of formal and grammatical adventures and inversions and reinventions of code.
In Pulp Fiction one such excursion is the sequence at Jackrabbit Slim’s, a restaurant/club that inverts the archetypal waitress-to-superstar legend by using lookalikes to reduce dead fifties idols (Monroe, Dean, etc.) to table stabb; the menu meanwhile collapses film history into pure consumption, offering Douglas Sirk steaks and Martin & Lewis shakes (junk food is a Tarantino motif). Vincent Vega (John Travolta) escorts his boss’s girl Mia (Uma Thurman) to this pop mausoleum, and the two connect. The scene unexpectedly achieves a kind of abandon that reminds me of Leos Carax: Mia and Vincent pairing for a cool, beyond-chic twist on the restaurant’s dance floor, their ultrastylized choreography the very image of the genre rhetoric of attitude, manners, and gesture that Tarantino seems to thrive on. He finds a Juliette Binoche in Uma Thurman here—and in the next scene as she dances alone in her house: it’s an almost transcendent moment.
Tarantino’s semi-mischievous reclassification of the crime movie ans art film, begun in Reservoir Dogs and carried through in Pulp Fiction, is accomplished partly through the introduction of improbably elaborate narrative architecture that obliges the viewer to contemplate the usually invisible mechanisms of narrative selection. But more crucially, in Tarantino’s oeuvre, spectacle and action paradoxically take the form of dialogue and monologue. The verbal set piece takes precedence over the action set piece, particularly in Reservoir Dogs, where, after all, the film’s central, defining absence is the much-discussed but never-shown jewelry store holdup. As Mr. Orange’s carefully rehearsed and Method-acting-perfected anecdote about a drug deal and a men’s room full of cops demonstrates, truth, even reality, become merely verbal constructs. More than what they do, what the characters say—and they never stop talking.
Both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs push genre convention towards dissonance, not only by saturating them in pop self-referentiality but by staging philosophical and metaphysical questions latent in genre itself. Reservoir Dogs confronts crisis of meaning and the limits of the knowable, from the opening argument about Mr. Brown (Quention Tarantino)’s reading of Madonna’s song Like a Virgin, to undercover cop Mr. Orange’s deceptive text (does that make him a sub-tec?), to the final negation of meaning faced by the betrayed Mr. White, who, falling dead, leaves an empty frame to express final, definitive denial of meaning’s presence.
But if Reservoir Dogs implies truth and fiction alike are acts of both will and faith, in Pulp Fiction verbal and narrative monopoly over truth shows signs of breaking down. Now there are three interdependent stories, far less determinist in character and not imperiled by Dogs’ narrative crisis of confidence; and now the spoken word, though potent, isn’t absolute—as Vincent says of a rumor about Mia, “It’s not a fact, it’s just what I heard.”
Pulp Fiction shares its predecessor’s fetishes—violence as grammar; styling over pathology, plot as farcical, sadistic game; a hermetic, atemporal yet-retro sense of the present—but it is a far more adroit, nuanced work. Its short-story format, complemented by an anthology of period styles from the fifties, the seventies, and forties noir, liberates its fondly regarded characters from genre’s fatal maze. In place of Reservoir Dogs‘ mounting crescendo of confrontations, Pulp Fiction against all expectation resolves its narrative threads with a series of negotatiated settlements. The film is rife with amicable partings, terse exchanges of bygones, acts of generosity and forgiveness; all the stories furnish lucky escapes from nightmarish, no-win predicaments. If it’s Tarantino’s Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993), call it Close Shaves.
But Tarantino ventures further. By opting for a structure that scrambles chronology without flashbacks, he grants centrality to the transformation of the character of killer Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), who survives death through “divine intervention,” is blessed and cleansed by Harvey Keitel’s debonair angel, and discovers mercy. Jules is the beneficiary of the film’s accumulated grace, and Tarantino, revising the image of void that ended Reservoir Dogs, frees him to exit the film’s last shot.
Both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs pull in different aesthetic directions simultaneously—realism on the one hand, artifice on the other.
That’s this mix that I’ve been trying to do. I like movies that mix things up. My favorite sheer cinematic sequences in Pulp Fiction, like the OD sequence, play like, Oh my God, this is so fucking intense, all right; at the same time, it’s also funny. Half the audience is tittering, the other half is diving under the seat. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs works that way, too. I get a kick out of doing that. There’s realism and there’s moviemovie-ness. I like them both.
The starting point is, you get these genre characters in these genre situations that you’ve seen before in other movies, but then all of a sudden out of nowhere they’re plunged into real-life rules. For instance, in Reservoir Dogs the fact that the whole movie takes place in real time: what would normally be a ten-minute scene in any other heist movie ever made—all right, we’re making the whole movie about it. The movie takes place in the course of an hour. Now, it takes longer than an hour to view it because you go back and see the Mr. Orange [Tim Roth] story. But every minute for them in the warehouse is a minute for you. They’re subjected to not a movie clock but a real-time clock. So you’ve got these movie guys, they look like genre characters but they’re talking about things that genre characters don’t normally talk about. They have a heartbeat, there’s a human pulse to them.
Reservoir Dogs felt very theatrical in terms of mise-en-scène, especially the section between Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink) and Harvey Keitel (Mr. White) before Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde) arrives, where you film them as if they’re on an empty stage.
That was actually a problem [when] trying to get the film made. People would read it and go, “Well, this isn’t a movie, this is a play, why don’t you try and do it in an Equity Waiver house?” I was like, “No, no, no, trust me, it’ll be cinematic.” I don’t like most film versions of plays, but the reason I had it all take place in that one room was because I figured that would be the easiest way to shoot something. To me, the most important thing was that it be cinematic. Now having said that, one of the things I get a big kick out of in Reservoir Dogs is that it plays with theatrical elements in a cinematic form—it is contained, the tension isn’t dissipated, it’s supposed to mount, the characters aren’t able to leave, and the whole movie’s definitely performance-driven. Both my films are completely performance-driven, they’re almost cut to the rhythm of performance.
Performance being a key theme in the film—Mr. Orange’s onscreen construction of his fictitious persona obviously suggests that the other characters do much the same thing.
Exactly. That’s a motif that runs through all these gangster guys. Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) has the line in Pulp Fiction, “Let’s get into character.” They’re a cross between criminals and actors and children playing roles. If you ever saw kids playing—three little kids playing Starsky and Hutch interrogating a prisoner—you’ll probably see more real, honest moments happening than you would ever see on that TV show, because those kids would be so into it. When a kid points his finger at you like it’s a gun, he ain’t screwing around, that’s a gun where he’s coming from.
It was never a conscious decision, playing on the idea of big men are actually little boys with real guns, but it kept coming out and I realized as I was writing Pulp, that actually fits. You can even make the analogy with the scene with Jules (Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) at Jimmy (Quentin Tarantino)’s house, they’re afraid of their mom coming home. You spilled shit on the carpet—clean up the mess you made from screwing around before your mom gets home.
The opening scene of Reservoir Dogs with the characters at the diner to me isn’t naturalistic, but rather sets up the illusion of naturalism.
It has that cinéma-vérité give and take, and yet: it has one of the most pronounced camera moves in the whole movie, that slow-moving 360 degrees where people get lost and then you find them again. But while I’ve got this big camera thing happening—and believe me, it was a big pain in the ass to shoot that—at the same time the camera is just catching whoever it happens to catch at the time. It’s not choreographed so that it’s on Mr. Orange and it hits Mr. Pink as he says his line and then finds itself on Mr. Blonde as he says his line—no, it’s not doing that at all, people are talking off-screen and the camera’s just doing its own independent thing.
One of the things I like doing is incorporating many different styles of shooting in the course of making a movie. I never shoot in one specific cinematic language. I like using as many as are appropriate. Part of the fun of that opening sequence is that there are three different styles of shooting. The whole first part, the Madonna section, is just the camera moving around— even when you go to a close-up, the camera’s still doing its move around. Then when it gets into the Harvey Keitel–Lawrence Tierney thing about the address book, you stop and do two-shots, and then when it gets into the tips part, we’ve got the geography of the table now, so the whole thing is done in these massive close-ups. Whenever you do a scene that long, you have it break it down into sections. Ten minutes for your opening sequence is a real long fucking time, especially if they’re doing nothing but sitting down talking. Why did I shoot the third section in close-ups? I don’t really have an answer—it just felt right.
So what do you do if it’s ten minutes of one person talking in a room, not moving about?
I kind of do that with the Christopher Walken scene (in Pulp Fiction). Three pages of monologue, this long story. And I’m not Mr. Coverage. Unless I know I want to shoot a lot of different things so that I can play around with it in the editing room, I shoot one thing specifically and that’s all I get. I never cover myself.
What kind of coverage did you do in the Walken scene?
I shot maybe thirteen or fourteen takes of the basic shot that you see in the movie, the kid’s point of view. Then I did five or six takes of Chris doing it in close-up, and then I just had the little kid. Chris would do one take this way and one that way. He’s telling a three-part story about the First World War, the Second World War, and then Vietnam, and all three beats are very different. So I could use the more humorous take on the First World War and then the Second World War story where he’s talking about Wake Island, which is more tragic, I took his darkest take, and then for the Vietnam story I took his most irreverent one, which is the funniest. The whole thing with him is take it and run with it. He’s just so great at doing monologues, about the best guy that there is at it, and that’s why he did the movie, because he doesn’t get the chance to do three-page monologues in movies knowing it’s not gonna be cut.
One of the fun things about making a movie is, there’s a whole lot of vocabulary, so this scene I’ll shoot in one long take, this scene I want to do through forced perspectives, this scene I want to do with very minimal coverage, like the bathroom scene between Bruce Willis (Butch) and Maria de Medeiros (Fabienne).
What do you mean, forced perspectives?
The camera’s taking some odd point of view.
For instance, in Reservoir Dogs when you film Buscemi and Keitel in the bathroom from way down the hallway?
Exactly. Or the perspective outside the doorway during the scene between Bruce and Maria. You feel like a fly on the wall, observing these people acting like people act when they’re alone. It should be somewhat uncomfortable and embarrassing being in the hotel room with them because they’re madly in love with each other, and they’re at that uppermost honeymoon point of a relationship, so they’re talking all this baby talk. You’re watching something you shouldn’t really be seeing, and you don’t know how much you want to see it because there’s an extreme level of intimacy going on. That whole sequence is just made out of three cuts, three long sections; there’s very little intercutting in the entire hotel sequence. And the shower sequence is just one shot. The third section with the big argument about the watch was done with zooms slowly creeping in. Focusing in but not moving: a dolly up to somebody has a whole different feel, a zoom is more analytical. Also, there’s a tension when actors have to pull a scene off in one shot. If you try to get too smart with it, you shoot yourself in the foot, but there’s something about getting together with the actors and saying, “Look, this is the deal. We’re gonna do these many takes and the best one is gonna be the one in the movie.” Good actors rise to the occasion.
Have you ever been forced to patch a scene or moment together in the cutting room because it didn’t work the way you shot it?
If you get to the editing room and it absolutely didn’t work, then you’ll still make it work. Sometimes you have a great sequence but with a stumble, and you got to fix that stumble. (Some) scenes I’m gonna shoot from a zillion different angles because in the editing room I want to be able to completely pop around and cut to performance. People think you shoot a lot of different angles just because you’re doing action. That’s true, but it’s also a big performance thing. When you look at the way Tony Scott did the Christopher Walken–Dennis Hopper scene in True Romance, a million different angles, but it’s all cut to a performance rhythm.
I tend to associate that kind of coverage with a lack of directorial point of view.
When Tony does it, it’s not a willy-nilly thing, that’s just how he shoots. His whole style is to have a cut every fifteen seconds.
Can’t stand that.
Yeah, but when you say you can’t stand that, you’re reacting against his aesthetic—but that’s what he wants to do. Me, I like to hold for as long as I can before I have to cut, and then when I do cut, I want it to fucking mean something. At the same time, I love how Tony does it. The whole sequence in Pulp Fiction where Sam Jackson and John Travolta come to the yuppies’ apartment is covered in that style, because I’m dealing with Sam’s big monologue and I’ve got all these guys all over the room. We’re popping all around.
Was that the most covered scene in the film?
That, and the whole (coffee shop) sequence at the end is covered from this side and that side so that I can pretty much cross the line at will, depending on the action. Forget what anyone else says, far and away the biggest problem with making movies is that fucking axis line. I always thought that would be a major fucking problem that I would have, because I never quite understood it. If you tried to explain it to me, after a certain point I would glaze over. I realized that I actually did grasp it, instinctually. In that sequence you start out with the guys here, and I’m coming this way (Sam Jackson left/Tim Roth right), and I want to get over this way (right of Roth), and just as we were shooting I figured out the exact line, the exact setup, and the exact cut that would bring me over here—OK, great! I’ve got a really good script supervisor, and his number one thing is the line. And from the moment that I established that I can cross the line, I know I can go back—I got over there the way you’re supposed to, it’s not crossing the line, it just gets me over to the other side. And once I got over there, I can go back and forth between the two. I figured that out on my feet, and it’s one of my prouder moments.
A moment that really stands out in Reservoir Dogs is the cut to Tim Roth firing the gun at Michael Madsen at the end of the torture scene. It’s one of those cuts that just knocks me out. Is there a secret to a cut like that?
It’s a great emotional cut. Like after all those long takes in Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), all of a sudden you cut to Jimmy Stewart. It cuts to Stewart’s reaction, you’ve never seen a reaction shot the whole movie—whoa! I figured out what was important was watching Mr. Orange empty out his gun. It wasn’t BLAM—cut to Michael Madsen—BOOM. More shots. It
wasn’t going back and forth between Mr. Blonde getting shot and Mr. Orange shooting. It looks like he’s gonna set the guy on fire and BOOM—he’s blown out of frame, and we see the guy (Mr. Orange) who you forgot was even in the room, by this time he’s become a piece of furniture. And as he’s emptying the gun, the camera goes around him and reveals Mr. Blonde blown all the way across the warehouse. It was realizing that the visceral dramatic impact of the piece was not Mr. Blonde getting shot but Mr. Orange doing the shooting.
Because it’s Mr. Orange finally doing something. The whole movie he’s lying there and suddenly he acts.
You can see him, he’s there, but his presence becomes this lump. It wasn’t like we even cheated by framing him out constantly so you get the illusion of being alone—Blonde actually goes over to him and still he doesn’t make the impression. So when Orange shoots him it’s a real jolt. They’re always referring to him, too—he’s the reason they don’t leave. The whole thing as a writer was to constantly throw something new in their path that they have to deal with. The trick was to keep them in the warehouse. Why would they stay? Because something new keeps happening. White
(Harvey Keitel) can’t take him (Orange) to a hospital but Joe (Lawrence Tierney) is supposed to be there (at the warehouse). Joe can get a crook doctor like that; all right, just sit here and wait for Joe at this rendezvous—that’s what he’s saying to Mr. Orange. The irony is, when Joe shows up, he shows up to kill Orange. Then Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) shows up and says, “No, this was a setup.” Mr. White never thought of that, now he’s thinking about that. And Mr. Pink is saying, “No one’s showing up, we’re on our own, we gotta do something.”
And Pink and Blonde have no emotional investment in Orange, unlike White.
Steve has talked about this quite a bit. People write off Mr. Pink as being this weasel who just cares about himself, but that’s not the case. Mr. Pink is right throughout the whole fucking movie. Everything he says is right, he just doesn’t have the courage of his own convictions. However, there’s a moment that nobody ever talks about, nobody catches, it’s there but they don’t see it: he says, “Look, Joe ain’t coming, Orange was begging to be dropped off at a hospital. Well, since he doesn’t know anything about us, I say it’s his decision—if he wants to go to a hospital and go to jail afterwards, then that’s fine. That’s better than dying.” So then Mr. White does something different than he’s done throughout the entire movie. His whole thing is, “What about Orange? What about Orange?” But now he says, “Well, he [Orange] knows a little bit about me.” His one moment of self-interest in the whole movie. If all he gave a shit about was just saving Mr. Orange, he might have kept his mouth shut and taken the consequences. But he says it. And Mr. Pink says, “Well, that’s fucking it. We’re not taking him.” And now it’s not on Mr. White’s shoulders any more, now Mr. Pink is drawing the line, and they get into a fucking fight about it. White conveniently lets Mr. Pink be the bad guy now, and then actually slugs him out of righteous indignation. Faced with that one little moment where he could be completely selfless, White doesn’t rise to the occasion, which in some ways even highlights what he does later on, when he actually does rise to the occasion. I never make a big dramatic moment about that. White’s hesitation is very human.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s films are maybe the primary influence on Reservoir Dogs—I think Le Doulos (1962) particularly, with its emphasis on structure and mannerism. Yet there are big differences: Le Doulos is so minimalist and nonverbal, Melville applies a less-is-more principle; Reservoir Dogs is ruled by verbal excess. And Le Doulos has a very steady, even tone, where Reservoir Dogs is all peaks and valleys. I think the relationship is fascinating.
I do, too. Le Doulos has been probably my favorite screenplay of all time—just from watching the movie. I just loved the wildness of a movie that up until the last twenty minutes I didn’t know what the fuck it was I was looking at. And the last twenty minutes explained it all. I was really fascinated by how, even though you don’t have any understanding about what’s going on in that first hour, you’re emotionally caught up in it. I know when I go see a movie and I start getting confused, I’m emotionally disconnected, I check out emotionally. For some reason I don’t in Le Doulos.
The film’s power is that it’s genuinely mysterious.
But the first time you see it you have no idea that mystery is gonna be solved as well as it is. That’s the joy of it—I’ve had faith in this movie all this time and I had no idea my faith was gonna be paid back so well.
You feel the director at play with the material and with you—that’s the emotional thread, his feeling for the genre.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head—99 percent of the reason that when a film starts confusing me, I check out is because I know it’s not intentional. I know whoever’s at the helm doesn’t have firm control of the material and it’s a mistake that I’m confused. When you know you’re in good hands, you can be confused and it’s okay, because you know you’re being confused for a reason. You know you’ll be taken care of.
Were you concerned about what unified Pulp Fiction as you wrote it?
In a way yes, in a way no. When you’re writing something like this, taking all these separate pieces and trying to make one big piece out of it, the best, richest stuff you find as you’re doing it, you know? I had a lot of intellectual ideas, like wouldn’t it be great if this character bumped into that character? A lot of it was kind of cool, but if it just worked in a cool, fun, intellectual way, ultimately I ended up not using it. It had to work emotionally.
As opposed to Dogs, which is a complete ensemble piece, (Pulp Fiction) works in a series of couples—everybody’s a couple all the fucking way through. It starts off with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, then it goes to Sam Jackson and John Travolta, then John Travolta and Uma Thurman, then it goes to Bruce Willis and the cab driver, then it’s Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros—and then for a moment after he leaves her, he’s the only character in the movie who’s viewed completely alone. Then he makes a bond with this other character and they become a team. It’s only when they become a team that they can do anything. Circumstances make them a couple.
Your characters are all social beings situated in their own private culture. The only other loner is Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. He’s not on the same wavelength as the other guys.
But him and Chris Penn are just as close, if not closer, than the others.
But there’s a side of Madsen that nobody knows about. Nobody really truly knows him.
Even Chris doesn’t know about it. Some switch got flipped in prison.
(The screenplay for) Pulp Fiction opens with the title “Three stories … about one story.” What does that mean?
I thought I was writing a crime film anthology. What Mario Bava did with the horror film in Black Sabbath (1963), I was gonna do with the crime film. Then I got totally involved in the idea of going beyond that, doing what J. D. Salinger did with his Glass family stories where they’re all building up to one story, characters floating in and out. It’s something that novelists can do because they own their characters, they can write a novel and have a lead character from three novels back show up.
That’s why all your films have references to characters from one another. The characters in Reservoir Dogs refer to Marsellus (Ving Rhames), who is the hub of all the stories in Pulp Fiction.
Very much so, like Alabama (Patricia Arquette in True Romance). To me they’re all living inside of this one universe.
And it isn’t out there (pointing out the window).
Well, it’s a little bit out there, and it’s also there, too (points at his TV), in the movies, and it’s also in here (points to his head). It’s all three. I very much believe in that idea of continuing characters. So what I mean when I wrote “Three stories … about one story,” when I finished the script I was so happy because you don’t feel like you’ve seen three stories—though I’ve gone out of my way to make them three stories, with a prologue and an epilogue! They all have a beginning and an end. But you feel like you’ve seen one story about a community of characters, like Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) or Short Cuts (Altman, 1993) where the stories are secondary. This is a much different approach—the stories are primary, not secondary, but the effect is the same.
I interpreted “Three stories … about one story” as being a comment on genre: that these three stories are all ultimately about the genre invoked by the title, Pulp Fiction.
The story of a genre. The three stories in Pulp Fiction are more or less the oldest stories you’ve ever seen: The guy going out with the boss’s wife and he’s not supposed to touch her—that’s in The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984), Revenge (Tony Scott, 1990). The middle story, the boxer who’s supposed to throw the fight and doesn’t—that’s about the oldest chestnut there is. The third story is more or less the opening three minutes of Action Jackson (Craig R. Baxley, 1988), Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985), every other Joel Silver movie—two hit men show up and blow somebody away. Then they cut to “Warner Bros. Presents” and you have the credit sequence, and then they cut to the hero three hundred miles away. Here the two killers come in, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM—but we don’t cut away, we stay with them the whole rest of the morning and see what happens to them. The idea is to have these old chestnuts and go to the moon with them.
You also combine these archetypal movie genre narratives with incidents straight out of pop-contemporary urban legends—the date who ODs or the S&M torture chamber in the basement.
If you talk to anybody who was a heroin addict for any period of time, they all have stories about someone who OD’d, they all have their own version of that story. If you talk to any criminal, they all have their own version more or less of The Bonnie Situation (Chapter Six of Pulp Fiction), some weird fucking thing that happened that they had to deal with.
On the one hand you’re making films in which you want the audience emotionally involved, as if it’s “real.” On the other you’re commenting on movies and genre, distancing the viewer from the fiction by breaking the illusion. On one level your movies are fictions, but on another level they’re movie criticism, like Godard’s films.
One hundred percent. That’s one aspect of Godard that I found very liberating—movies commenting on themselves, movies, and movie history. To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.
There were always movie buffs who understood film and film convention, but now, with the advent of video, almost everybody has become a film expert, even though they don’t know it. My mom very rarely went to movies. However, now that there’s video she sees everything that comes out—I mean everything—but on video, six months after the fact. What I feel about the audience—particularly after the eighties where films got so ritualized, you started seeing the same movie over and over again—intellectually the audience doesn’t know that they know as much as they do. In the first ten minutes of nine out of ten movies—and this applies to a whole lot of the independent films that are released—the movie tells you what kind of movie it’s gonna be. It tells you everything that you basically need to know. And after that, when the movie’s getting ready to make a left turn, the audience starts leaning to the left; when it’s getting ready to make a right turn, the audience moves to the right; when it’s supposed to suck ’em in, they move up close.
You just know what’s gonna happen. You don’t know you know, but you know.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of fun in playing against that, fucking up the breadcrumb trail that we don’t even know we’re following, using an audience’s own subconscious preconceptions against them so they actually have a viewing experience, they’re actually involved in the movie. Yeah, I’m interested in doing just that as a storyteller. But the heartbeat of the movie has to be a human heartbeat. Now, if you were to walk out of the theater after the first hour of Pulp Fiction, you really haven’t experienced the movie, because the movie you see an hour later is a much different movie. And the last twenty minutes is much different than that. That’s much harder to do than when you’re dealing with a movie about a ticking bomb like Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction is much more of a tapestry.
Again, a lot of things that seem unusual for films—for instance, the Reservoir Dogs characters’ offhanded brutality, their commitment to their cold-bloodedness—are not unusual in a novel in the crime genre. The characters have a commitment to their own identity, as opposed to in action movies or big Hollywood movies where every decision is very “committeeized” and the whole fear is that at some point the character might not be likeable. But people find John Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction not only likeable but very charming—considering the fact that he’s first presented as a hit man and that’s never taken back. He is what he is, he is shown plying his trade, but then you get to know him above and beyond that.
But once a film starts breaking itself down, commenting on itself, exposing the illusions of fiction, you open a Pandora’s box. When Madsen makes the Lee Marvin joke in Reservoir Dogs or Uma Thurman draws a square out of thin air in Pulp Fiction, once you reposition the viewer like that, can you get away with reverting to straight storytelling later in the film as you seem to?
I think I do. What makes that whole square so exciting is you hadn’t seen anything quite like it in the movie up until that point. There are little moments like that—you see the black-and-white behind Bruce Willis in the cab, the car process shots in general—but they never disconnect you emotionally. Because after the square, you dive into one of the more realistic sections of the movie. You go on a fucking date with them (Vincent and Mia), that’s not a quick “They talk—bababababa—and get to the point.” The movie almost stops for you to get to know Mia (Uma Thurman).
But the device of giving genre characters like hit men unlikely conversational topics inevitably draws attention to the fictive basis of what’s onscreen.
That’s putting your preconceptions about what you think people who do that for a living talk about.
No, on a behavioral, emotional level, you’re making choices that go against naturalism. When Sam Jackson (Jules) has all that business with the hamburger and delivers that long spiel to Frank Whaley (Brett) in the apartment before killing him, the only naturalistic justification is because his character has some need to do that—but you don’t make that choice. So where’s it coming from?
To me, it’s coming from the fact that he’s (Jules) taking control of the room: you walk in like you’re gonna cut off everybody’s head, but then you don’t cut off their heads. He’s never met these guys before, he’s improvising, he’s gotta get that case. So he’s like a real nice guy, he’s cool, he’s kind of playing good cop/bad cop and he’s the good cop, he’s the guy who sucks you in. He says that speech before he kills him (Brett) because … that’s what he does. He explains that later in the movie—“I have this speech I give before I kill somebody.” That’s Jules’s thing, to be a badass. It’s a macho thing, and it’s like his good-luck charm. He’s playing a movie character, he’s being the Green Lantern saying his little speech.
That’s what I mean—that’s where it stops being a character and starts being a commentary.
To me, they don’t necessarily break the reality. You hear stories about gang-bangers doing routines from movies before they do a drive-by.
Why do you think neither of your films adheres to the classical principle of single-character point of view?
I keep applying to cinema the same rules that novelists have when they come to writing novels: you can tell it any way you want. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would be dramatically less interesting if told in a completely linear fashion.
But the True Romance screenplay is linear.
True Romance wasn’t written in a linear fashion originally. It started off with the same first scene of Clarence (Christian Slater) talking about Elvis, then the next scene was Drexl (Gary Oldman) killing all his cronies, and the third scene was Clarence and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) at Clarence’s father’s house. And then you learn how he got what he got. Tony (Scott) made it all linear, and it worked that way.
If you break it into three acts, the structure they all worked under was: in the first act the audience really doesn’t understand what’s going on, they’re just getting to know the characters. The characters have far more information than the audience has. By the second act you start catching up and get even with the characters, and then in the third act you now know far more than the characters know, you’re way ahead of the characters. That was the structure True Romance was based on, and you can totally apply that to Reservoir Dogs. In the first section, up until Mr. Orange shoots Mr. Blonde, the characters have far more information about what’s going on than you have—and they have conflicting information. Then the Mr. Orange sequence happens and that’s a great leveler. You start getting caught up with exactly what’s going on, and in the third part when you go back into the warehouse tor the climax you are totally ahead of everybody—you know far more than any one of the characters. You know more than Keitel, Buscemi, and Penn because you know that Mr. Orange is a cop and you know more than Mr. Orange does because he’s got his own little ruse he’s gonna say. But you know Mr. Blonde’s lineage, you know he went to jail for three years (in loyalty to) Chris Penn’s father, you know what Chris Penn (Eddie Cabot) knows. And when Mr. White is pointing the gun at Joe (Lawrence Tierney) and saying, “You’re wrong about this man”—you know he’s right. You know Keitel’s wrong, he’s defending a guy who’s actually selling him out.
To me, 90 percent of the problem with movies nowadays lies in the script. Storytelling has become a lost art. There’s just situations. A story isn’t “Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer goes to New York to capture a Canuck bad guy.” Or, “White cop and black cop looking for a killer but this time they’re looking in Tijuana.” Those are situations. They can be fun. I just saw Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) the other day, a totally fun movie, had a blast. The last twenty minutes gets kind of cheesy, but up until then it was totally engaging. Situation filmmaking at its best, because they really went with it. Speed works. The only thing is, I used to ride a bus for a year and I know that people aren’t as gabby on a bus as they’re portrayed. You’re getting to work and people do not talk. They were kind of doing an Airport (George Seaton, 1970) thing.
I watched Macon County Line (Richard Compton, 1974) again a few months ago. Cool film. And I was shocked at how much of a story it told. Not that complicated a story, but it took me to different levels. One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992) was a story. However, Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) is one of my favorite movies of last year, and that’s a totally situation movie. But they went way beyond the situation and told a story.
A friend of mine said action movies are the heavy metal of cinema, and that’s not that far off. Action movies have become the mainstay for young male cinemagoers, and they don’t have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Even a mediocre action movie has a couple of good sequences you can enjoy to some degree. However, (I’m) so used to seeing weak-assed action films that don’t deliver. Speed stayed with me. I’m kind of interested in seeing it again.
I was sent a script this weekend that’s gonna be a big movie and they want me. It was an interesting idea. And it’s a fun movie. I’ll see it on opening night. But it’s not what I want to spend a year making. It’s an action movie, wall-to-wall action scenes. And I don’t do wall-to-wall action movies.
Do you think Pulp Fiction represents the start of a partial retreat from genre?
The entire time I was writing Pulp Fiction I was thinking, “This will be my Get-It-Out-of-Your-System movie. This will be the movie where I say goodbye to the gangster genre for a while,” because I don’t want to be the next Don Siegel—not that I’m as good. I don’t want to just be the gun guy. There’s other genres that I’d like to do: comedies, Westerns, war films.
Do you think your next film might not even be a genre film?
I think every movie is a genre movie. A John Cassavetes movie is a genre movie—it’s a John Cassavetes Movie. That’s a genre in and of itself. Eric Rohmer movies to me are a genre. If you come up with something that falls into that same crime/mystery genre and if you really want to do it, do it. Because I’m basically lazy, and to get me to stop enjoying living life, it’s gotta be something that I really wanna do. I’m gonna take almost a year off. I remember when I was younger I was, like, I want to be like Fassbinder, forty-two films in ten years. Now that I’ve made a couple, I don’t want it.
Definitely one of the highlights of this in-depth Pulp Fiction treasure trove. Free film school in the form of Tarantino’s 70-minute masterclass.
If you have twenty minutes to spare, this is a must-see: Quentin Tarantino discusses the process of writing Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds.
Quentin Tarantino doesn’t hesitate to share his two cents, and we’re blessed with a detailed, step-by-step exploration of his writing process.
A great conversation Quentin Tarantino had with Charlie Rose, in which he details all the stops on the way to finishing Pulp Fiction. Worth your time.
On BAFTA Guru’s channel we found a great clip that explains quite a lot. Who would’ve guessed Tarantino watched The Wild Bunch and Deliverance as a mere child?
METHOD WRITING: AN INTERVIEW WITH QUENTIN TARANTINO
“Basically, my writing’s like a journey. I’ll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I’ll make some of those stops and some of them I won’t. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you’re going to do. It’s all the scenes in the middle that you’ve got to—not struggle, it’s never a struggle—but you’ve got to write through—that’s where your characters really come from. That’s how you find them, that’s where they live.”
Originally published in January/February 1998 issue of Creative Screenwriting, this fascinating interview with the Pulp Fiction writer/director was conducted by Erik Bauer and dives into the influence of Elmore Leonard’s work on Tarantino’s career, as well as all the compelling stops in Tarantino’s creative process from the conception of an idea to the full realization of the story.
Deleted and extended scenes from Pulp Fiction with the director’s commentary.
Juxtaposition of Sound in Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino’s commentary.
A shot-by-shot directing breakdown of the Pulp Fiction dancing scene and Jackrabbit Slim’s sequence:
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDRZEJ SEKULA
“Conversations with the director are just vital. You can create a skeletal plan for a shoot, but the real art of cinematography is in the improvisation. If you keep the lines of communication open, it usually leads to those sudden inspirations that make a film special.”—Andrzej Sekula for ASC
Born in Wroclaw, Poland in 1954, Andrzej Sekula began his career as a still photographer for a Polish film studio. As he served his compulsory conscription in the Polish army as a film cameraman, he was responsible for shooting army exercises organized for high-positioned officials like Brezhnev and Ceausescu. Cinematography became the focus of his attention thanks to the work of Oswald Morris, who shot Moulin Rouge and Fiddler on the Roof, and when Sekula moved to England to study at the National Film School, it was Morris who became his mentor in the second part of the 1980s. Sekula emigrated to Los Angeles at the close of the decade, and after shooting a couple of short films, he got his big break with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. He went on to shoot Pulp Fiction, as well as a series of notable movies like American Psycho and Hackers.
“Andrzej told us he wanted to shoot the entire film (Reservoir Dogs) on Kodak’s 50 ASA 5245 stock, which is typically used for daylight exteriors,” Tarantino explained what sealed the deal for him when he started considering Sekula as his director of photography. “That’s not the kind of thing most cinematographers would say when they’re competing for a job on a production that doesn’t have much money! But when I talked with him about the way I wanted the film to look, I always talked in terms of colors: ‘I want the reds to be really, really red’ and ‘I want the blacks to be black as hell.’ He picked the stock that would make the film look as rich as possible and make those colors pop.”
If you want to be reminded how the reds are “really, really red”, and the blacks are “black as hell,” check out this short presentation on some of Sekula’s finest work on Pulp Fiction.
EDITOR: SALLY MENKE
Born in Mineola, New York in 1953, inspired by the work of Thelma Schoonmaker Sally Menke started her career by editing documentaries for CBS. When she landed her first gig with Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs, he started a collaboration that would go on to define the careers of both of them. After Reservoir Dogs, Menke edited Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds. While their collaboration was cut short by Menke’s tragic death in 2010, she left behind a body of work that cemented her as one of the most important editors in contemporary film.
“The editing process and the writing process are very, very connected,” Tarantino explained why he formed such a strong partnership with Menke. “So much so that I truly feel that the final draft of the script is actually the first cut of the movie. And the final cut of the movie is the final draft of the script. I don’t write with anybody, I write by myself. But when it comes to the editing, I write with Sally. I guess it’s the true epitome of a collaboration because I don’t remember what was her idea, what was my idea, we’re just right there together.”
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend us your ears. Sally Menke gives an insightful perspective on her work with Tarantino for The Greenroom.
PULP FICTION: MAKING OF
“You have to understand, Quentin was so broke. He didn’t have a car, he didn’t have anything. That’s why he crashed at my couch all the time. Really broke. Not a cent to his name.”—Scott Spiegel, co-writer of Evil Dead II who introduced Tarantino to producer Lawrence Bender
“WHAT THE FUCK?”: SAMUEL L. JACKSON’S ACTING CONTEST
“I was doing Fresh for Lawrence Bender, who was the producer of Pulp. Quentin sent me the script, told me, ‘Jules is yours.’ I went in and they just wanted to hear the character. I read it, and they were like, ‘Amazing. Job’s yours.’ I come to New York, do Fresh. Then I hear, ‘Well, there’s this other actor who came in to audition for Pulp for another role, and he asked if he could read Jules, and we let him. And we kind of love him. So we need you to come back and read it again.’ Now I’m like, ‘What the fuck? What do you mean, read again?’ My agent’s managers call Harvey, they’re cursing him out. And Harvey’s like, ‘Look, Sam’s got the job. We just need him to come in, do it. Blah, blah blah.’
I shoot Fresh on a Saturday and I got on a plane that night, take the red-eye to LA. And I’m on the plane doing all the shit that I normally do when I get ready to do a job. I’m breaking down the fucking role. I’m breaking down the sentences. By the time I get there, they’re not even there. They’ve gone to lunch or some shit. They come back and everybody’s like, ‘Hey, Sam.’ And some dude, the last dude that came in, right behind me. He was going, ‘Hi, Mr. Fishburne. Glad to meet you.’ I was like, ‘What the fuck? Who is this motherfucker?’
Well, I go in the room and we’re doing the scene. And the first thing we’re doing is the killing room scene: ‘Do you speak English? English, motherfucker, do you speak it?’ And he’s so busy watching me, he gets lost in the fucking dialogue. And I’m like, ‘What the fuck? You’re fucking up my audition here!’ I want to slap him. By the time we finish and we do the end scene in the diner where I do the last scene, me and Tim Roth, they were like, ‘Thanks. Blah, blah, blah.’ I slammed the script down. I slam the door and leave. Go back to the airport, because I had to work Monday, come back to New York. Then I see Bender. And he’s like, ‘We were so going to cast this other kid until you did that last speech in the diner.’ And I was like, ‘Really, motherfucker? So I had to go through all that, after you told me I had a job?'”—Samuel L. Jackson
The Pulp Fiction cast remembers meeting Quentin Tarantino in this great interview from last year’s TCM Classic Film Festival:
Tarantino discusses the process of casting Bruce Willis:
Here’s a collection of behind-the-scenes and publicity stills from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Photographed by Linda R. Chen and D. Stevens @ A Band Apart Films LLC, Jersey Films. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
If you find Cinephilia & Beyond useful and inspiring, please consider making a small donation. Your generosity preserves film knowledge for future generations. To donate, please visit our donation page, or donate directly below:
