Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction
The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. How did Quentin Tarantino, a high-school dropout and former video-store clerk, change the face of modern cinema? Mark Seal takes the director, his producers, and his cast back in time, to 1993.
SEE All the Deaths in Quentin Tarantino’s Movies, Charted
SEE The Making of Pulp Fiction in Stills, Snapshots, and Script Pages
GLORY-BOUND Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Travolta in 1994, shortly after Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”
When Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script consultant for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most notably,Chinatown. “Quentin was fascinated by the way I worked with Towne and his team,” she says, explaining that she “basically lived” at Towne’s condominium, typing, researching, and offering feedback in the preparation of his movie The Two Jakes. “He would ask the guys for advice, and if they were vague or disparate, he would say, ‘What did the Chink think?’ ” she recalls. “Quentin found this dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing.
“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino was a “mad genius.” He has said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,” but Chen says they’re even worse. “His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”
The producer, Lawrence Bender, and TriStar Pictures, which had invested $900,000 to develop the project, were pressing Tarantino to deliver the script, which was late. Chen, who was dog-sitting for a screenwriter in his Beverly Hills home, invited Tarantino to move in. He arrived “with only the clothes on his back,” she says, and he crashed on the couch. Chen worked without pay on the condition that Tarantino would rabbit-sit Honey Bunny, her pet, when she went on location. (Tarantino refused, and the rabbit later died; Tarantino named the character in Pulp Fiction played by Amanda Plummer in homage to it.)
His screenplay of 159 pages was completed in May 1993. “On the cover, Quentin had me type ‘MAY 1993 LAST DRAFT,’ which was his way of signaling that there would be no further notes or revisions at the studio’s behest,” says Chen.
“Did you ever feel like you were working on a modern cinematic masterpiece?,” I ask.
“Not at all,” she replies. However, she did go on to be the unit photographer on the film.
When Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low age.” Time declared, “It hits you like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.” In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it was “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.”
Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the most influential” movie of the 1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’ ”
Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, gave Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey and Bob Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls it “the first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new dial on the movie clock.”
“It must be hard to believe that Mr. Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested talent who spent his formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American filmmakers,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times.“You don’t merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole.” Jon Ronson, critic for The Independent, in England, proclaimed, “Not since the advent of Citizen Kane … has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making.”
“I Watch Movies”
Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. “Too vile, too vulgar, too violent” was the usual reaction, he later said. According to Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:
Dear Fucking Cathryn,
How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you.
“Like a lot of guys who had never made films before, I was always trying to figure out how to scam my way into a feature,” Tarantino tells me. Though he was indisputably king of all movie knowledge at Video Archives, the suburban-L.A. store where he worked, in Hollywood he was a nobody. Surrounded by videos, which he watched incessantly, he hit upon an idea for recycling three of the oldest bromides in the book: “The ones you’ve seen a zillion times—the boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and doesn’t, the Mob guy who’s supposed to take the boss’s wife out for the evening, the two hit men who come and kill these guys.” It would be “an omnibus thing,” a collection of three caper films, similar to stories by such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines. “That is why I called it Pulp Fiction,” says Tarantino.
He planned to share the writing with his fellow clerk Roger Avary and another friend. Tarantino would write the first story, about the guy who takes out the crime boss’s wife. Avary’s section centered on the over-the-hill boxer, who double-crosses a crime boss and then ends up rescuing him as he’s being anally raped by a hillbilly in a pawnshop.
When the third writer didn’t materialize, Tarantino had to write that story, too. Working in his mother’s house for three and a half weeks, he says, he heard a set of bizarre criminal characters speaking to him. Soon he abandoned his original idea and wrote instead a violent script about a gang of thieves and a bungled diamond heist. According to one source, he named it after Louis Malle’s 1987 film, Au Revoir les Enfants, which Tarantino playfully mispronounced as “reservoir dogs.” Scrawled across hundreds of pages, the script was unpunctuated, absolutely illegible, and undeniably great. Pulp Fiction would have to wait. Tarantino was determined to direct Reservoir Dogs then and there.
He talked to Lawrence Bender, a former tango dancer he’d recently met who had produced one low-budget horror movie, Intruder. After looking at the rough draft, Bender said, “Wow, this is extraordinary. Can you give me some time to raise some money?” Tarantino signed an agreement on a paper napkin, giving Bender two months to do it. One potential buyer was reportedly ready to mortgage his house, but only if he could direct the movie. No one seemed ready to back the untested Tarantino.
But Bender knew somebody who knew the actor Harvey Keitel, and that changed everything. Keitel meets me in a New York diner expressly because, he says, “I want your readers to know there’s great talent out there, and they should be seen and heard. We don’t have to keep repeating the same movies and sequels, ad infinitum. An example like Quentin should be a call to arms. Of course, people say, ‘Oh, so-and-so would have made it anyway.’ That’s almost like saying the world is fair, and the cream will rise to the top. That’s bullshit.”
Keitel heard about Tarantino from the theater director Lilly Parker, a colleague at the Actors Studio. “She simply said, ‘I have a screenplay I think you’re going to like,’ ” says Keitel. “I got stuck. I couldn’t speak about it. I just wanted to sit with it, which I did for a number of days, until I called Lawrence Bender.”
Soon after that, Tarantino arrived at the house Keitel was renting in Los Angeles. “I opened the door, and it was this tall, gawky-looking guy staring at me, and he says, ‘Harvey Kee-tel?’ And I said, ‘It’s Kye-tel,’ ” the actor remembers. “And it began there. I offered him something to eat, and he ate a lot. I said, ‘How’d you come to write this script? Did you live in a tough-guy neighborhood growing up?’ He said no. I said, ‘Was anybody in your family connected with tough guys?’ He said no. I said, ‘Well, how the hell did you come to write this?’ And he said, ‘I watch movies.’ ”
Keitel signed on as a lead actor, and his commitment to the project helped raise $1.5 million to produce the movie, but, most important, he backed Tarantino as director. Reservoir Dogs, according to the Los Angeles Times, “was arguably the most talked about movie of the [1992 Sundance Film] Festival.” The article continued:
Meanwhile, Hollywood is calling Tarantino about his future. But the director, who sleeps in his old room decorated with a Bobby Sherman lunch pail and posters of such movies as Breathless, The Evil Eye, and the French poster forDressed to Kill, isn’t answering.
“They’re offering me X movie, starring Mr. X, and I say, ‘Send it over and I’ll look at it.’ But everyone knows what I’m going to do. You see, I’m spoiled now. On Reservoir Dogs we never had a production meeting. It was kept pure. No producer ever monkeyed around with the script.
“So I have my own project and say, if you want to do it, then let’s do it. If you don’t like it, then I’ll go somewhere else.”
The project was Pulp Fiction, three intertwined crime stories set in Los Angeles. “Like the way New York is an important character in New York crime films, I would make Los Angeles an important character,” Tarantino tells me. “Then I started thinking about all of the characters overlapping The star of one story could be a small character in the second story and a supporting character in the third story and all that kind of shit.”
At the premiere of Terminator 2, in 1991, he met Stacey Sher, a young Hollywood executive who would soon become president of production at Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films. She introduced Tarantino to DeVito. “I listened to him for about 10 minutes, thinking, I may be meeting someone who talks faster than Martin Scorsese,” DeVito remembers. “I said, ‘I want to make a deal with you for your next movie, whatever it is.’ ”
“Does It Stay This Good?”
‘I had been broke my whole adult life,” Tarantino tells me. In my exploration of Tarantino’s pre-Pulp Fiction existence, I drive two hours outside of L.A. to the home of Roger Avary, his old fellow clerk and former writing partner. They were so close in those days that it was difficult to tell where one writer’s work ended and the other’s began. “It is kind of complicated, because you have to realize there was so much cross-pollination,” says Avary.
With the $50,000 he’d made on Reservoir Dogs, and the promise of $900,000 from TriStar Pictures for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino, who had never really left Los Angeles County, packed a suitcase with lurid crime novels and flew off to write the screenplay in the land of legalized marijuana and prostitution.
“We always said, ‘I want to get Amsterdamed!’ ” says Avary. Tarantino, however, insists that he went to Amsterdam strictly to write. “It was all about living in another country,” he says. He bought school notebooks and declared about one of them, like a modern-day Hemingway, “This is the notebook in which I am going to write Pulp Fiction.”
“I just had this cool writing existence,” he continues. “I didn’t have to worry about money. Through luck and happenstance, I found an apartment to rent right off a canal. I would get up and walk around Amsterdam, and then drink like 12 cups of coffee, spending my entire morning writing.”
He had filled several notebooks by the time of the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where Reservoir Dogs was screened at midnight, out of competition. It had already caught the attention of Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who would distribute it as a Miramax movie. “That screening set up Quentin Tarantino as a Cannes director,” says Richard Gladstein, the film’s executive producer, who arranged the screening and would later become head of production at Miramax Films.
After the festival, Tarantino, Stacey Sher, and Roger Avary drove to Amsterdam, where they stayed in Tarantino’s one-room apartment. “By the time I left Amsterdam, I had heard pretty much the whole first act,” says Sher. “He and Roger were working on the second act.” Avary adds, “We basically took all the scenes we had ever written and just laid them out on the floor, seeing how they fit.” By the time Avary left Amsterdam, he felt he was the co-writer of Pulp Fiction, he says, and he and Tarantino had an arrangement to that effect. Then he adds, “I think so.”
Tarantino remained in Amsterdam, doing what he’d always done with Avary’s scripts: embellishing, adding dialogue. “He didn’t write the script,” Tarantino says today. Yes, Avary contributed the story about the boxer, which is the centerpiece of the movie, and Tarantino reportedly paid him $25,000 for it. But that was only a launching pad, around which Tarantino created the script.
After production on the movie began, Avary reportedly received a call from Tarantino’s attorney, demanding that he accept a “story by” instead of a co-writer credit, so that Tarantino could say, “Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.” According to Down and Dirty Pictures, by Peter Biskind, Avary was insulted and refused to sign away his co-writing credit. Tarantino told him that if he didn’t accept the “story by” credit, Tarantino would write his section out of the script and Avary would get nothing. Eventually Avary signed for a share of the film’s profits, though he was quoted in Biskind’s book as saying that he felt betrayed. Today Avary says he doesn’t recall any of this.
All that was a lifetime ago. Just after midnight on January 13, 2008, Avary, by then an established writer and director in his own right (Killing Zoe, Beowulf), lost control of his Mercedes and crashed into a telephone pole. One passenger, an Italian friend, was killed, and Avary’s wife sustained injuries. Pleading guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, Avary was sentenced to a year. Today, he says, he is at peace with his collaborator and his credit. “I love the movie. I’m delighted with my contribution. That is enough. And I love Quentin. He’s like a brother.”
‘A script arrived at my house, the title page read Pulp Fiction, and I loved it,” says Danny DeVito. DeVito had a first-look deal with TriStar. “I had just spent a weekend at the White House, and there was a lot of talk that there was too much violence on the screen, and Hollywood should address it,” says former TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy. “So I read the script, which I liked a lot, and there was one scene that is really extremely violent, where they shoot someone in the back of the car and there are pieces of his brain splattered all over. The director and I had a discussion, and I said, ‘That is really over the top, and you’re going to get blowback.’ He said, ‘But it’s funny!’ It turned out he was right. The audience thought it was funny, and it did not get the blowback I thought it would get.” However, TriStar passed on making the movie.
“Every major studio passed,” says Lawrence Bender. Then, says DeVito, “I gave it to the king, Harvey Weinstein.”
It went through Richard Gladstein, who was now at Miramax. Weinstein, who had recently merged Miramax with Disney in an $80 million deal, was walking out of his L.A. office on his way to catch a plane for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Gladstein handed him the script. “What is this, the fucking telephone book?,” Weinstein asked him when he saw that it was 159 pages, the normal being 115. He lugged the script to the plane, however.
“He called me two hours later and said, ‘The first scene is fucking brilliant. Does it stay this good?’ ” remembers Gladstein. He called again an hour later, having read to the point where the main character, the hit man Vincent Vega, is shot and killed. “Are you guys crazy?” he yelled. “You just killed off the main character in the middle of the movie!”
“Just keep reading,” said Gladstein. “And Harvey says, ‘Start negotiating!’ So I did, and he called back shortly thereafter and said, ‘Are you closed yet?’ I said, ‘I’m into it.’ Harvey said, ‘Hurry up! We’re making this movie.’ ”
Disney may have seemed an unlikely match for Pulp Fiction, but Weinstein had the final say. “As for [then chairman] Jeffrey Katzenberg, that was the first test of what I call autonomy with Jeffrey,” says Weinstein. “When I signed my contract with Disney selling Miramax, with us still running the company, I wrote the word ‘autonomy’ on every page, because I had heard that Jeffrey was notorious for not giving it. When I read the Pulp Fiction script, I went to him and said, ‘Even though I have the right to make this, I want to clear it with you.’ He read it and said, ‘Easy on the heroin scene, if you can, but that is one of the best scripts I have ever read. Even though you don’t need it, I am giving you my blessing.’ ”
The script was sent out to actors with the warning “If you show this to anybody, two guys from Jersey [Films] will come and break your legs.”
Anyone but Travolta
‘John Travolta was at that time as cold as they get,” says Mike Simpson, Tarantino’s agent at William Morris Endeavor. “He was less than zero.” Marred by a series of commercially successful but creatively stifling movies, culminating in the talking-baby series, Look Who’s Talking, Travolta’s career seemed past saving. So, when he was told that Tarantino wanted to meet with him, he went to the director’s address, on Crescent Heights Boulevard.
Tarantino recalls, “I open the door, and he says, ‘O.K., let me describe your apartment to you. Your bathroom has this kind of tile, and da-da-da-da. The reason I know this is, this is the apartment that I lived in when I first moved to Hollywood. This is the apartment I got Welcome Back, Kotter in [the TV series that made him a star].’ ”
They talked until sunrise. Tarantino told him he had two films in mind for him. “A vampire movie called From Dusk Till Dawn and Pulp Fiction,” says Travolta, who replied, “I’m not a vampire person.”
Tarantino had planned on casting Michael Madsen, who played the ex-con sadist Victor Vega in Reservoir Dogs, in the role of the hit man Vincent Vega. But Madsen had already accepted a part in Wyatt Earp, so Tarantino called Travolta and said the part was his.
“Three times I had set trends,” Travolta tells me, referring to his early roles inSaturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy, and Grease, which helped launch disco, cowboy chic, and greasers. Would his playing of Vincent Vega spawn a battalion of heroin-addicted hit men? He told Tarantino, “I’ve never played a drug addict on-screen. Do I really want to shoot up and kill people?”
“No, no, I’m cutting away a lot of that stuff,” Tarantino told him. Next, Travolta consulted his agent, his friends, and his wife, Kelly Preston. “All were pushing for me to do it,” he says.
Everyone except Harvey Weinstein, who wanted anyone but Travolta. Mike Simpson had given Weinstein a “term sheet” of Tarantino’s demands, which included final cut, a two-and-a-half-hour running time, and final choice of actors. “One of the actors I had on the list was John Travolta,” says Tarantino. “And it came back: ‘The entire list is approved … except for John Travolta.’ So I got together with Harvey, and he’s like, ‘I can get Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Penn, William Hurt.’ ” By then, according to Simpson, “Daniel Day-Lewis and Bruce Willis, who was the biggest star in Hollywood, had both gotten their hands on the script and wanted to play Vincent Vega.”
During a late-night telephone call with Simpson, the Weinsteins accepted all of Tarantino’s deal points except one—the casting of Travolta. “At midnight our time, three in the morning in New York, Harvey said, ‘Let’s just close the deal, and we’ll address that tomorrow in good faith,’ ” Simpson recalls.
Simpson told him, “You’re going to agree to it right now, or there’s no deal.” Harvey erupted, but Simpson held firm. “We’ve got two other buyers waiting outside to get this,” he said. (Ronna Wallace, of Live Entertainment, which had produced Reservoir Dogs, had actually stormed William Morris security that night in an attempt to disrupt Simpson’s call with the Weinsteins.) “You’ve got 15 seconds to agree to it. If I hang up, it’s over,” said Simpson. “Harvey kept talking, arguing, and I said, ‘O.K., 15, 14.’ When I got to eight, Bob goes, ‘Harvey, we have to say yes.’ Harvey says, ‘O.K., fuck it.’ ”
Later, when the Weinsteins saw the finished film in Los Angeles, Harvey announced facetiously, 20 minutes into the screening, according to Gladstein, “I’m so glad I had the idea to cast John Travolta.”
The movie had no bankable stars, however, until Harvey Keitel picked up his daughter one day at Bruce Willis’s house in Malibu. “He mentioned that Quentin was getting ready to do another film,” says Willis. A rabid fan of Reservoir Dogs,Willis wanted to work with the young director, even if it meant taking a drastic reduction in the $5 million he had reportedly received for Die Hard. “It was so far ahead of anything,” Willis still says of Reservoir Dogs.
Keitel invited Willis to a barbecue at his home, saying that Tarantino would be there. The superstar arrived, and, one insider insists, he wanted the leading role, Vincent Vega. But with Travolta already cast as Vega, there was only one possible part for Willis—Butch, the boxer—which Tarantino had promised to Matt Dillon, whom he’d had in mind originally for the role. “Quentin was a man of his word,” says Simpson. “So he gave Matt the script, and he read it and said, ‘I love it. Let me sleep on it.’ Quentin then called me and said, ‘He’s out. If he can’t tell me face-to-face that he wants to be in the movie—after he read the script—he’s out.’
“And so Harvey Weinstein said, ‘O.K., let’s put Bruce Willis in that role,’ ” Simpson continues. “He’s going to get Willis in the movie one way or another, right? And, of course, Bruce is ‘What? I’m not going to play the lead? I’m going to be bound up by some hillbilly in a pawnshop so that John Travolta can be the lead?’ ”
Willis recalls the deal more diplomatically, saying that when he was offered the role he immediately said yes. About the pay cut, he adds, “There’s a term for it in Hollywood: I don’t think it was ever about the money for anyone.”
Except for Harvey Weinstein. “Once I got Bruce Willis, Harvey got his big movie star, and we were all good,” says Tarantino. “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.” (The Weinsteins recouped their $8.5 million investment before production even began by selling the foreign rights for $11 million.)
Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Holly Hunter, and Rosanna Arquette were all reportedly considered for the role of Mia Wallace, the sexy wife of a burly crime boss. But Tarantino had decided on Uma Thurman. “Uma’s the only person he met with [by himself],” says Lawrence Bender.
Thurman’s agent, the late Jay Moloney, who committed suicide in 1999, knew the part was perfect for Thurman, but the actress wasn’t sure. “I was 23, from Massachusetts,” she tells me in the New York restaurant Maialino, referring to the boarding-school environment she came from. Even today, after starring in two other Tarantino movies—Kill Bill and Kill Bill: Vol. 2—and becoming known as his muse, it takes Thurman a moment to return to the raucous role that made her famous. She says she was in a “funny little slump,” after starring in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, when Moloney sent her Pulp Fiction. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the movie,” she says, explaining that it wasn’t just the obscenity, or her character’s drug habit—it was also the anal rape of her crime-boss husband. “Pretty frightening,” she says.
Over a three-hour dinner at the Ivy, in Los Angeles, followed by a marathon discussion in Thurman’s New York apartment, Tarantino struggled to convince her. “He wasn’t this revered demigod auteur that he has grown into,” Thurman remembers. “And I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, because I was worried about the Gimp stuff,” she adds, referring to the character in leather who is unlocked from a cage, set up to have his way with the bound-and-gagged Marsellus Wallace. “We had very memorable, long discussions about male rape versus female rape,” says Thurman. “No one could believe I even hesitated in any way. Neither can I, in hindsight.”
How Jackson Stole the Part
Samuel L. Jackson had to fight for his role as Jules Winnfield, the Bible-quoting hit man. The rage of that fight returns as he tells me the story in his publicist’s conference room in Beverly Hills. “O.K., calm down,” he tells himself at one point. Tarantino had told Jackson that he’d written the role for him, and therefore was asking him just to read, not audition. After their session together, Jackson returned confidently to filming Fresh, another movie produced by Lawrence Bender, only to learn that he was in danger of losing the role to the Puerto Rican actor Paul Calderon.
“Quentin handed me the part of Jules and said, ‘Bring it in,’ ” Calderon remembers of his New York audition. “I took the material home, and the rhythms were similar to Lawrence Fishburne, and Quentin told me later Fishburne, whether it’s true or not, turned it down.” When Calderon finished the audition, he says, Tarantino was applauding. “All of a sudden Sam’s job was not so damned secure,” says Tarantino today.
When Jackson learned that his role was possibly going to Calderon, he says, “agents, managers, and everyone got on the phone and called Harvey,” meaning Harvey Weinstein, who had told Tarantino that Jackson would be critical in promoting Pulp Fiction. (“He said, ‘I can put Sam Jackson on Arsenio Hall fucking tomorrow,’ ” says Tarantino.) Weinstein urged Jackson to fly immediately to L.A., this time to “blow [Tarantino’s] balls off.”
Jackson spent the hours on the plane marking up the script, “figuring out the relationships.” He landed just before lunchtime, not knowing that Calderon had also flown from New York to audition again that same weekend. “It was like high noon,” Calderon remembers. “I was the first one who was going to audition; Sam was supposed to come in after me.” But Tarantino arrived late, which caused Calderon to lose his cool. “We went into the audition room, and one of the producers started to read with me, which, to this day, I look back on it and think, I should have said no,” he says. “I couldn’t recapture the rhythms I had in New York. At the end, I said, ‘I give up.’ The air was going out of me like the Goodyear blimp.” Tarantino wound up giving him a small part in the movie.
“I sort of was angry, pissed, tired,” Jackson recalls. He was also hungry, so he bought a take-out burger on his way to the studio, only to find nobody there to greet him. “When they came back, a line producer or somebody who was with them said, ‘I love your work, Mr. Fishburne,’ ” says Jackson. “It was like a slow burn. He doesn’t know who I am? I was kind of like, Fuck it. At that point I really didn’t care.”
“In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food,” says Richard Gladstein. “Me and Quentin and Lawrence were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared shitless. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head. His eyes were popping out of his head. And he just stole the part.” Lawrence Bender adds, “He was the guy you see in the movie. He said, ‘Do you think you’re going to give this part to somebody else? I’m going to blow you motherfuckers away.’ ”
When Jackson came to the final scene in the diner, where Jules quotes the Bible, his acting became so real, so angry, that the actor reading with him lost his place. “And when I got back to New York, I was still pissed,” says Jackson. “Bender told me not to worry. Everything was cool. The job was mine. And he said the one thing that sealed it was they never knew how the movie was going to end until I did the last scene in the diner.”
Tarantino cast Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, who were friends, as Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, a pair of restaurant robbers. “Their size, their look, their energy, everything about them made me want to use them together,” Tarantino has said. He told another friend, Eric Stoltz, “There are two parts you can do, and they both wear bathrobes.” Stoltz chose the role of Lance, a heroin dealer. Tarantino played the other part himself.
The Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros got the part of Fabienne, the diminutive waif who reduces Bruce Willis to a love-struck wimp. “Well, love conquers all, I tell you,” says Willis. “I played a boxer, a guy who kills another guy in the ring and is just tamed by his love for Fabienne. She was fantastic.”
According to Samuel L. Jackson, for the part of Marsellus Wallace, Mia’s husband, who is violated in the rape scene, Tarantino originally considered Max Julien, who played Goldie in the 1973 blaxploitation film The Mack. “Max Julien wasn’t going to do that,” says Jackson of the anal rape. “He’s the Mack. He’s Goldie. He’s like, ‘No, I don’t think my fans want to see that.’ ” Ving Rhames, the theater veteran, who grew up in Harlem, however, actually embraced the rape scene. “Because of the way I look, I don’t ever get the opportunity to play many vulnerable people,” he has said. “He was very alone in his unconcern,” says Tarantino, adding, “It was a sheer mark of his masculinity.”
To prepare for filming, everyone had to “get into character,” as Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules tells John Travolta’s Vincent before their first contract killing in the movie. Tarantino needed the right things to wear. “I had to buy clothes for him,” says Linda Chen, “because he just wore T-shirts that had writing on them.” Uma Thurman required training in drug use, gun-moll behavior, and what she calls “a gamy use of language.”
Tarantino enlisted Craig Hamann, a friend from acting school and a former heroin addict, to ensure that everything about drugs in the film would seem absolutely authentic. In close-ups, Thurman snorted sugar. “Disgusting,” she recalls.
“I said, ‘There is no way I’m going to do heroin, so I’ve got to spend some time with addicts in order to do this,’ ” says Travolta. “Quentin set me up with a white-collar addict. Then I set myself up with a street addict, and I spent a few days with these guys and took notes.” The white-collar addict was Hamann, who taught Travolta how to replicate a heroin high. “He said, ‘Drink as much tequila as you can and lay in a warm pool or tub of water,’ ” the actor recalls.
The black suits and ties Travolta and Jackson wore were Tarantino’s idea, but Travolta wanted to define Vincent Vega more clearly through “an extreme image”—his hair—by adding extensions onto his own mane for a “Euro haircut, which is sometimes Eurotrash and sometimes elegant,” he says. “Tarantino was hesitant, and I said, ‘Please at least look at me in this,’ and I got the hair extensions and I worked on the do. I put my best foot forward on the test. That just killed it.”
Jackson had mentally created every aspect of Jules Winnfield, down to his church. “He believed in God,” says Jackson. “He just kind of strayed from that path, and he understood a revelation when he saw it, and he knew not to ignore it.” Jackson grew muttonchop sideburns, but his glossy Jheri-curl wig, which caught the splattered debris of a dead man’s brain so adroitly, was a lucky mistake. “A production assistant Quentin sent to south L.A. to buy an Afro wig had no idea what that was,” says Jackson. She returned instead with a Jheri-curl wig, which Tarantino rejected but which Jackson loved. “All the gangbangers had Jheri curls,” he says.
The main actors were equalized by the movie’s modest budget. “Quentin and Bruce actually helped with the budget,” says Weinstein. “We got this incredible group of talent to work for nothing.” Bender came up with a formula, whereby every cast member would be paid the same amount. “It turned out to be $20,000 a week,” he says. “Travolta, I think he worked seven weeks, so he made $140,000. John used to laugh that by the time he rented his place at the Four Seasons Hotel he basically paid to be in the movie.” (The major cast members, however, also shared a percentage of the film’s profits, according to Lawrence Bender.)
“Living My Dream”
Principal photography for the 51-day shoot began on September 20, 1993, under the broiling heat of electric lamps shining in on the Hawthorne Grill, in suburban Los Angeles, the first of the film’s 70 locations and sets. That is where the couple played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer go from breakfast to robbery. Tarantino says he was on “a creative and imaginative high. I was just living my dream.” Determined to make an $8.5 million movie look as if it cost $25 million, he shot with “the slowest film Kodak made,” which required the ultra-bright lights, according to Bender. “Each one of them is like the power of the sun,” he explains. “We thought the lights were going to crack the glass in the diner, it was so hot.”
A non-union crew, some of whom had worked on Reservoir Dogs, backed Tarantino. Call sheets and location maps for each day of the filming include strict rules outlawing “alcohol or drugs while in our employ” and specific alerts such as “There will be gunfire, be prepared” and “Wardrobe and makeup: blood and gore.” During the same week that Tarantino filmed the opening scene, he filmed the last: with Jules and Vincent in the Hawthorne Grill, interrupting the robbery that starts the movie.
Travolta felt that he had to humanize Vincent Vega from the very beginning. When he and Jackson are driving to a contract killing, for instance, they are discussing the limits of legalization in hash bars and Europe’s “little differences,” such as the names of McDonald’s hamburgers in Paris. “We were on Hollywood Boulevard, with lights and shit all over this car and people screaming at us, because they could see us in the car,” says Jackson. “They had no idea what it was, just that it was John.”
Most actors wouldn’t have dared revise lines of Tarantino’s script, but Travolta felt that he had to invent a cool way of speaking in order to articulate certain ones properly. It began with his line about what they call the Quarter Pounder in Paris: “A Royale with cheese.” Travolta explains, “I remember thinking it would be funny to slow that down and say it with complete ‘lipshual’—I’m making that word up—articulation so that the line was overemphasized with my lips and teeth. I knew that, his being the guy he was, any oddity was acceptable. Quentin said later, ‘I didn’t know I was doing a comedy—you made this role so funny.’ I said, ‘You needed me to do it, because blowing up someone’s head is not funny. But if you say something off-kilter or bizarre at the time this awful thing happens, then it’s funny, because it’s unexpected.’ ”
Later, still on the way to the contract killing, Vincent and Jules discuss at length Mia Wallace and how her barbarous husband threw a gangster off a fourth-floor balcony for giving her a foot massage. A John Cassavetes retrospective Tarantino had attended in Paris inspired that seemingly improvisational scene. “The way they talk around what they’re doing,” he explains. “I was like, Can I get that kind of thing going on the page? My attempt to do that is the entire scene of Jules and Vincent with the yuppies and the briefcase.” (The mysterious briefcase, which glows in Travolta’s face when he opens it, was filled with “two batteries and a lightbulb,” as Jackson once explained.)
The movie soon cuts to Marsellus Wallace’s massive head, which the audience sees only from the rear. He’s in a bar, and Ving Rhames had a Band-Aid on his head to cover a cut. Tarantino insisted that he leave it on. Willis says he needed no preparation for the scene. “I was just going by the information in the script,” he says. “He pretty much told me my history as a boxer was pretty much over, and this would be a great opportunity for me to throw a fight.”
“I met a drug dealer and junkies, and I watched a fellow shoot up,” says Eric Stoltz of his role as the dealer who offers Vincent a choice of three grades of heroin. Vincent shoots up on the spot, following Craig Hamann’s guidance on how to lovingly caress a “rig” (needle and spoon) and how to indicate the way a heroin high comes in waves, not all at once.
In one scene Travolta, stoned to stage perfection, picks up Mia Wallace for their date. They drive to a theme restaurant, actually a set built in a Culver City warehouse. “The one set piece that was the most enjoyable to me was Jack Rabbit Slim’s, and walking in noticing [actors dressed up as] iconic film stars and the irony of being one as well, you know, a living icon walking through Madame Whatchamacallit’s Wax Museum,” says Travolta.
From that point forward, the movie gains rapid propulsion. After they’re seated and the waiter—played by Steve Buscemi, one of many in the cast who had also been in Reservoir Dogs, here made up to look like Buddy Holly—takes their order, Mia says she’s going to “powder my nose.” “Quentin told me how to do it,” says Thurman, meaning snorting sugar off the washbasin.
She was dreading having to dance with John Travolta, she says, “because I was so awkward and embarrassed and shy.” Tarantino had written the scene before Travolta was officially in the movie, but now it was the star of Saturday Night Fever, fat and 40, who was on the floor once again.
‘Quentin recommended the Twist,” remembers Travolta. “And I said, ‘Well, Little Johnny Travolta won the Twist contest when I was eight years old, so I know every version. But you may add other novelty dances that were very special in the day.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘There was the Batman, the Hitchhiker, the Swim, as well as the Twist.’ And I showed them to him, and he loved them. I said, ‘I’ll teach Uma the steps, and when you want to see a different step, call it out.’ ” Tarantino then filmed the scene right on the dance floor with a handheld camera, calling out, “Watusi! Hitchhiker! Batman!”
“Quentin called me and said that in the scene he was then writing Mia is overdosing,” remembers Hamann. “He asked me, ‘What would somebody do to revive her?’ I said, ‘When it happened to me, somebody hit me up with salt water.’ It worked. Quentin took it a step further: adrenaline to the heart.”
Travolta, after winning the dance contest, is talking to himself in the bathroom in Mia’s home, knowing he’s a dead man if he doesn’t extricate himself from the minx in the living room. Meanwhile, she’s trawling through his trench coat, where she discovers a bag of triple-Grade A heroin, which she immediately lines up and snorts. “Maybe it was brown sugar at that point,” says Thurman. “The idea was that the character was too stoned to notice the difference between heroin and cocaine.” By the time Travolta comes out of the bathroom, she’s comatose, bleeding from the nose and foaming at the mouth. “Campbell’s mushroom soup,” says Thurman about the spittle, adding that the glazed-eyes effect was hers alone. “I worked myself up, acting. I don’t think we put anything in my eyes. You’re paid for something.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!,” Travolta shrieks upon seeing the limp Mia, whom he scoops up and throws in his car. Speeding through the night in a 1964 red Chevy Malibu, which was actually Tarantino’s car, he crashes onto the lawn of his drug dealer, Lance, who prescribes an adrenaline shot to Mia’s heart. “Uma, what a good sport she was!” says Stoltz. “She was bleeding, and John and I kept dropping her body and banging her into doors—this beautiful woman. The truth was we all had a wild crush on Uma.”
Travolta had to stab Thurman in the heart with an oversize prop syringe. “We had different ideas on how she would react to the adrenaline shot,” says Thurman. “But the one I did was inspired by something I didn’t witness, but had heard about from the crew and cast on Baron Munchausen [the 1988 film in which Thurman makes a nude entrance as Botticelli’s Venus]. There was a tiger in Spain that they had over-sedated to film safely, and they had to give it some adrenaline to revive it. That was my inspiration.” In the film, in fact, Mia springs back to life “like a roaring tiger.”
That scene would make Pulp Fiction a classic, but in fact the whole 154-minute film turned out to be a series of can’t-look-away moments. But what did it mean? Today, Samuel L. Jackson comes closest to answering the question. “The people who are worth saving get saved,” he says. “The two robbers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, get saved. They get another chance—that’s their redemption. Uma has the chance to die. She didn’t die. Butch gets another chance. Marsellus Wallace even gets another chance.”
“You once said Pulp Fiction is an aberration, a phenomenon,” I remind Jackson. “You said, ‘I doubt if Quentin can explain it. I know I can’t.’ ”
When I ask Tarantino if he agrees that Pulp Fiction is about redemption, he says, “It’s explicit throughout the piece.” He continues, “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.”
Filming wrapped on November 30, 1993, with Christopher Walken delivering a four-minute monologue in which he, as Captain Koons, presents a gold watch to Bruce Willis’s boxer character as a child. “That speech is like eight pages,” Walken tells me, “and every time I would get to the part about the watch [which Butch’s father hid in his ass for five years after being captured by the Vietcong], it made me laugh.
“We started shooting at about eight in the morning,” Walken continues. “Everybody had gone home. It was just a small crew in a house out somewhere, with me, the little boy, and his mother.” The speech was so long, he says, that “the little boy was getting sleepy, and I just did the rest into the lens.” He employed an old theater trick to keep his saliva flowing: “You get a little dry, and I find that Tabasco or a bite of lemon fixes that.”
At the wrap party, held on the Jack Rabbit Slim’s diner set, Walken danced alongside John Travolta. “Somebody said, ‘They should do a musical together!’ ” remembers Stoltz. (They were later both in Hairspray.)
Walken says it took some time before he fully realized the global impact of Pulp Fiction. “I was in a steam room in Europe somewhere, and there were a half-dozen young guys in there,” he says. “Well, this one guy starts in on the speech, word for word! He had memorized it, and all of his friends started cracking up. I thought it was a wonderful tribute to Quentin.”
“My whole thing with Miramax was to try to lower their expectations,” says Tarantino. “I kept pointing to the Damon Wayans movie Mo’ Money. And I was like, ‘I think we’re going to do really well with black audiences, and even though our movie is different, it actually fits into a similar genre. We cost $8 million.Mo’ Money made $34 million, so if we make $34 million, we’ve done really, really good.’ I kept trying to lower their expectations, because I couldn’t imagine it was going to be a smash.” Stoltz adds, “I don’t think anyone really anticipated the success, except maybe Harvey Weinstein.”
The Iron Curtain Strategy
‘We’re in the Quentin Tarantino business,” Bob Weinstein told The New York Times shortly before the release of Pulp Fiction, in the fall of 1994. A key part of the business plan was to build momentum at the box office. Harvey Weinstein inaugurated the strategy that would dominate many awards seasons to come. “He thinks of every angle, pushes the boundaries,” says Mike Simpson.
The first event was the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994. Miramax flew some of the cast and crew to the Riviera. “It was like The Wild Bunch hit the Croisette,” says Lawrence Bender.
Jackson had never been to Cannes. “So everybody was on the red carpet, and everybody knows Bruce, which was funny, because Bruce and I were doing Die Hard: With a Vengeance at that time,” he says. “We actually went over there together. People were screaming, ‘Bruce, Bruce!’ And then ‘John, John!’ Then it was ‘Who’s that black guy?’ ”
Pulp Fiction answered their question. “My wife is one of the harsh-critic people,” says Jackson. “She called me one night to say that she had seen Pulp Fiction. I was like, ‘So what do you think?’ And she said, ‘All this time, I always criticize you for doing this, for doing that. As I sat down and watched that movie, I realized that you’ve got it. You’re a movie star.’ ”
“My strategy with Pulp Fiction is more legendary than it is truthful,” Harvey Weinstein tells me. “I put an iron curtain on the movie. We screened it for Cannes, they said yes, and then I wouldn’t let anybody else see it. There was only one press screening in the morning at Cannes, and then there was the evening screening. So you got the full impact. It wasn’t a series of little screenings, like so many other movies were doing. I really think we changed the paradigm with what we call the Iron Curtain Strategy.”
Weinstein also zeroed in on key American critics at Cannes, including Janet Maslin, of The New York Times. “Harvey was targeting her as the one most likely to write the right rave review, and he set it up so she would have a connection with Quentin beforehand. He had done his homework,” says Mike Simpson. “He knew who everybody on the jury was, and he knew which hotel they were in and what their room number was. Anyway, it’s a rave review, and Harvey makes copies, and before the jury members see the movie, he slips a copy of the review under their doors.”
On the night of the awards, the festival’s president, Gilles Jacob, urged Weinstein to be sure that he and the cast attend the ceremony. Tarantino had reportedly told Weinstein that he would skip the event if Pulp Fiction was going to be shut out. And it didn’t win anything until the very last award, the Palme d’Or, for the best of the 22 feature-film entries. When that year’s jury president, Clint Eastwood, announced that the winner, by what turned out to be a unanimous vote, was Pulp Fiction, the audience went wild. After Tarantino and the cast rushed onstage, one woman screamed, “Pulp Fiction is shit!” Tarantino shot her the finger and then said why the prize was unexpected: “I don’t make movies that bring people together. I make movies that split people apart.”
The film wasn’t seen again until September—a month before its wide release—at the New York Film Festival. Tarantino sat with Stoltz, who recalls, “We were sitting on one of those Juliet balconies, where you can look down on the audience. Just as the needle scene was happening, they brought the lights up. There was shouting: ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ People ran down the aisle and carried this fellow, who had fainted, out. I started to feel bad. This is not what you want as an actor: to endanger people’s lives. And Quentin said, ‘This isexactly what you want, for people to get so consumed that they faint.’ ” The movie was stopped for nine minutes. “I was sure people would think I planned it,” Harvey Weinstein said at the time. “Just another Miramax publicity device.”
When it came to the 1995 Academy Awards, the Weinsteins planned everything.Bob says that he and his brother had ensured that the movie went “wide from the get-go” and rose to be No. 1 in America. Winning big at the Oscars would give the film a second life at the box office and in the home-video market. Pulp Fiction was nominated not only for best picture but also for six other awards, including best actor in a leading role (Travolta), best supporting actor (Jackson), best actress in a supporting role (Thurman), and best director (Tarantino).
For best picture, Pulp Fiction had to compete with a formidable feel-good movie that was its very antithesis: Forrest Gump. According to Jami Bernard’s biography of Tarantino, Miramax had spent $300,000 to $400,000 on the Oscar campaign, only about half what Paramount perhaps spent on Forrest Gump.Weinstein used his money wisely. “He was like a forensic scientist and had done demographic analysis as to who are the likely voters,” says Mike Simpson. “Meryl Poster [now president of television at the Weinstein Company] was sort of Harvey’s main lieutenant in terms of garnering Academy votes. She would go out to the motion-picture home in the Valley, a retirement community for those in the business. It’s like everybody there is an Academy member. You’ve got like 400 votes right there. She would go out and have lunch with little old ladies and make a personal connection with each one of them, saying, ‘Watch the movie and vote for our film.’ ”
At the Oscars, on March 27, 1995, the award for best original screenplay was announced early in the evening. When the presenter, Anthony Hopkins, said the winners were Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, television screens went black for a moment, which Avary says was payback for pranks Tarantino had played on him in the past. “I paid off a cameraman 500 bucks to have the camera turned off on Quentin when they announced the award,” claims Avary. “So if you watch it online, you’ll see it cuts to black briefly, and then they cut to me.Gotcha.” The two former video clerks hugged onstage as Pulp Fiction’s opening-credit music boomed through the Shrine Auditorium. Avary thanked his wife and then told the audience, “I really have to take a pee right now, so I’m going to go.” Tarantino said, “I think this is probably the only award I am going to win here tonight.”
He was right. The night belonged to Forrest Gump.
But the future was Quentin Tarantino’s.
Vanity Fair · by Mark Seal · March 1, 2013
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/01/pulp-fiction-oral-history-quentin-tarantino