September 16, 2024
I love all my films but ‘True Romance’ was the best screenplay I ever had. And all that was Quentin. It was so well crafted. But I did change the end. Originally in Quentin’s version [Christian Slater dies] and Patricia [Arquette] pulls over on the freeway and she puts a gun in her mouth [she doesn’t die]. I shot the film in continuity, so by the time I got to the end of shooting the movie, I had fallen in love with the two characters. It was a love story. I wanted these characters to live!
—Tony Scott
By Tim Pelan
Quentin Tarantino famously says of himself, “I didn’t go to film school, I went to films.” Working alongside early collaborator Roger Avary at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California, this autodidactic video rental generation auteur wrote constantly, dreaming big. Although he had pretensions as an actor, directing his own material was his dream gig. “I noticed that independent movies didn’t do a hell of a lot for the actors that were in them. A director did an independent movie and he would go off and do another movie.” The behind-the-counter gang would constantly read each other’s scripts and “contribute.” Tarantino asked Avary if he could take a look at his short story, The Open Road in 1987. Months later, he’d taken, according to Avary, “everything he ever wanted to do into this one thing, bits and pieces of Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction. But it was written as he spoke, so his voice was there. I was weeping by the end of it. It barely contained any of my original screenplay, but he had brought an emotional soul to it that was beyond what I had written.”
That screenplay became True Romance, arguably QT’s most autobiographical work, yet, when Hollywood came knocking in the form of Tony Scott (his assistant was friends with Tarantino and introduced Scott to both True Romance and Reservoir Dogs), it was Reservoir Dogs that the young wannabe retained for his blistering debut (Scott wanted to do both, was told he could only do one). That makes sense, as True Romance is more ambitious in scope in terms of set up, locations, action and ensemble, and further removed from his faddish fantasies. At least QT made peace with it in another’s hands—he still hates Oliver Stone’s version of Natural Born Killers. Scott’s visually escapist bubblegum flourishes and Tarantino’s peppery patter make an (eventual!) winning Open Road to success.
At the beginning of True Romance, Tarantino avatar Clarence (Christian Slater), a Detroit comic book store clerk and movie geek, flirts in a bar with a call girl with a heart of gold Alabama (Patricia Arquette). She dubiously agrees to attend a Sonny Chiba triple bill with him at the cinema (it’s his birthday treat). The two click and she comes back to his place. He discovers his boss paid her to come on to him (so the character remains pure, whilst having his “tart with a heart” fantasy). He persuades her to leave her pimp, who does not take kindly to this. Upon going to pick up Alabama’s things from said pimp Drexl (a dreadlocked wigger as played by Gary Oldman), Clarence winds up killing him and stealing a suitcase of cocaine (“I think what you did… was so romantic,” she naively says). They then flee on the open road, pursued by mobsters, a movie producer, and the cops, in a Badlands-flavoured tale of dysfunctional desperadoes—composer Hans Zimmer heavily references Badlands theme Gassenhauer from Musica Poetica in his naïf You’re So Cool.
The film could be seen as an updating of Terence Malick’s Badlands substituting Martin Sheen’s bad boy Kit and Sissy Spacek’s teenager Holly for a more likable Clarence and Alabama. “I didn’t have any qualms for wanting to pay homage to that film,” said Scott, who considered it one of his top five favorites. The two films each draw from a lauded history of the American outlaw in movies, from Bonny and Clyde to Dillinger. Punctuated by Alabama’s romanticized voiceover in the unsophisticated manner of Spacek’s in Badlands, True Romance draws, as is to be expected in a movie geek’s wish fulfillment, with other lauded work. With regards to Clarence’s killing of Drexl and that earlier quoted devotion of Alabama’s, Arquette was uneasy about it. “I had a hard time with the scene where Clarence tells me he’s killed Drexl and I say, ‘What you did was so romantic.’ I couldn’t jump to that reaction. My acting coach and I came up with the idea that here’s a man I barely know, who killed someone and is eating a burger. He could kill me next. As a female, the way to stay safe is to be in a love bubble. Part of her does think it’s romantic, like, kill all the mistakes I ever made.”
Probably Arquette’s best (and most brutal) “bubble” moment is in her and Clarence’s L.A. hotel room when mob enforcer Virgil breaks in looking for Clarence, who is not there, so Alabama survival flirts and plays dumb at first, only for him to beat her for information, before she turns the tables and brutally kills him. When she first discovers Virgil, there for the suitcase of cocaine, her eyes register fear, before her hooker survival mode kicks in: she flirts with Virgil, tells him she doesn’t have any coke but there’s a Pepsi machine down the hall. Scott said of the scene, “Gandolfini exudes both childlike innocence and enormous fucking danger. The fight scene between him and Patricia builds slowly, like a volcano. There’s small talk at the beginning: ‘You’re so cute—spin around for me.’ Then he pops her.” Arquette felt that, “First it’s about a girl waiting for her boyfriend to rescue her, and she’s working through her natural bag of tricks: flirting, being dumb. Then Virgil tells her about the transition he made to being a killer. And really, he’s telling her what’s going to happen to her in a moment. She’s going to make this transition, and she’s never going to be the same person.”
She’s scared, but she fights back, braining him with an Elvis bust, improvising a flame thrower with hairspray and a lighter, eventually pounding on him with his own shotgun, after a bruising smackdown. Alabama may be written as a slightly sycophantic mirror for the writer avatar, but through performance and direction, she embodies gender roles according to the situation that will keep her alive, yet still reveal the vulnerability beneath. Former Empire editor Terri White enthused that “Alabama is determined, loyal, full to the very top with fight. Her sweetness, her optimism-come-naivety isn’t weakness. It’s testament to the resilience of her beauty and spirit in the face of everything and anything.” She goes on to champion her “firing a shotgun at the ceiling, drenched in blood and sweat, screaming with fury. In that moment, she is screaming for every woman who had been abused, violated, and traumatized. And we screamed with her.”
Clarence, on the other hand, is not exactly the most stable of young men. Obsessed with Elvis, he imagines himself interacting with him, played in the shadows by Val Kilmer as a non-judgemental mentor. “I like you, Clarence. Always have. Always will.” Slater considered him “an oddball. Not your typical film hero. He obviously spent a lot of time alone, talking to his imaginary Elvis. His brain wasn’t all there.” His tough guy improvising comes from all the movies he’s consumed. Tarantino considered the actor playing his “alter-ego” to be “too handsome. I was thinking of Robert Carradine.” He described Clarence in his screenplay as “a young hipster hubcap,” with Alabama as “vaguely reminiscent of the Tasmanian Devil.” Scott had the actor watch Taxi Driver first. “I was chasing black fucking comedy, and Christian was looking at it as more of a comedy.”
True Romance differs from Early QT films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in that the approach is linear, and more singularly focused on its protagonists, their love story, and the craziness that surrounds it. But the original script didn’t flow that way. From a Tarantino interview in Film Comment’s July-August 1994 issue:
“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. It’s not just, you have to tell it linearly. It’s inherent in the stories. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would be dramatically less interesting if you told them in a completely linear fashion.”
“True Romance wasn’t written in a linear fashion originally. It started off with the same first scene of Clarence talking about Elvis, then the next scene was Drexl killing all his cronies and the third scene was Clarence and Alabama at Clarence’s father’s house. And then you learn how he got what he got. Tony made it all linear and it worked that way.”
“If you break it into three acts, the structure they (Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance) 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.”
Tarantino feels that Scott breathed cinematic life into his script, opening up scenes, denying that the director “glossed up my script, made it too pretty, too vivid. That’s what makes it work so well, and the casting and performances he got.” Scott fell in love with the kids, and had QT partner Roger Avary change the ending, where instead of Clarence being killed, the young lovers escape the carnage, flee to Mexico, and have a baby boy they name Elvis, naturally. “Mine would have been more cynical. I wanted to make you fall in love with Clarence and blow his fucking head off, I wanted to do that to you. Tony didn’t want to do that. Clarence was me, I could blow my own head off, a punk rock move,” QT told IndieWire after a double bill screening of True Romance and Domino in memoriam to Scott shortly after his tragic demise.
The appeal of True Romance owes as much to the costume designs of Susan Becker, who also dressed the casts of St Elmos Fire and The Lost Boys. High-tailing it to L.A. in a battered pink Cadillac, our young lovers wear a riot of colors and retro styling. Alabama is a vision of fuchsia, teal bra, teal heels, and leopard spots leggings, alternating the leggings for a cow print miniskirt, pre-Jessie from Toy Story western shirt and off-the-shoulder flouncy top with blue cowboy boots. Clarence’s vintage rockabilly look comprises bowling shirts, Hawaiian prints, an ex-army M-65 field jacket for those cold Detroit winters, and sandy beige nubuck leather shoes with white laces, also popular with teenagers in the ‘50s. Clarence’s sunglasses reflect his Elvis obsession, naturally his tackier, later look: gold “Nautic 2” oversized pilot sunglasses from German eyewear company Neostyle. The Bride dons the same style when she awakens from her coma in Kill Bill. The newlyweds seal the knot with matching diamond-studded gold horseshoe rings that each of them appropriately wears on the third fingers of their respective left hands.
As for their influence on young lovers and action dramedy since the film picked up a cult following after initial poor performance? “People have told me that they put the ‘You’re so cool’ line in their wedding vows,” Tarantino reflects. “I even met a couple with matching ‘you’re so cool’ tattoos. True Romance and Reservoir Dogs were the growing pains for Pulp Fiction’s success. Audiences were seeing something they hadn’t seen before—comedy and violence switching on a dime. They’d be horrified one second and laughing the next.”
Tim Pelan was born in 1968, the year of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (possibly his favorite film), ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Barbarella.’ That also made him the perfect age for when ‘Star Wars’ came out. Some would say this explains a lot. Read more »
“When you’re a nobody, it’s murder to get anyone to read your scripts. So my thing was making the first page fantastic, with dialogue that grabbed you right away. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, ‘Read the first three pages. If you don’t like it, throw it away.’” —Quentin Tarantino
“The only lines Christopher Walken and I improvised in our big scene were my line ‘You’re part eggplant,’ and his line ‘You’re a cantaloupe.’ The rest was written by Quentin. Was I worried about the racial overtones? Not really. Because it’s factual. The Moors did invade Sicily, and they did breed. Quentin writes like people speak. He doesn’t have to be PC.” —Dennis Hopper
A monumentally important screenplay. Screenwriter must-read: Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for True Romance [PDF1, PDF2]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray of the film is available at Arrow Video and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
I loved his shit. He’s like Douglas Sirk, he never got respect, was too commercial, people put him down. Now they teach classes about him. —Quentin Tarantino
Host Jeff Goldsmith interviews writer-director Quentin Tarantino and writer-director Richard Kelly about their experiences of writing and working with director Tony Scott.
Quentin Tarantino tells the story behind the “Sicilian scene” in True Romance.
The archival audio commentary by writer Quentin Tarantino.
Behind-the-Scenes (15:21)—this is the goldmine, all it is is b-roll footage of Tony Scott and actors working on the film without comment or context. The b-roll footage covers the Drexel vs Clarence scene, the Walken vs Hopper scene, the rollercoaster scene, and the final shoot-out. This is definitely one that everyone will want to see as it’s a fascinating look at Scott directing the various actors. —The Movie Isle
Tony Scott discusses his thoughts on Quentin Tarantino, the film’s “unusual story,” his passion for the film, the script, what drew him to it, and more in this interview.
An inspiring short interview with the late, great director Tony Scott about directing and his older brother Ridley Scott.
Dedicated to Tony Scott, one of the most visually innovative directors in Hollywood history.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Tony Scott’s True Romance. Photographed by Ron Phillips © Warner Bros., Morgan Creek Entertainment, Davis-Films. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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