The year was 1962, Knoxville, Tennessee. The
talented fifteen-year-old Connie McHugh finishes school early and gets a job as a nurse at the
local hospital. One day after work she meets a charming actor and musician named Tony Tarantino.
After a few months, they get married. And a few months after that, they split. As a parting gift,
Tony leaves his ex-wife a surprise. A little of his DNA, which 9 months later receives a name. “I found out I was pregnant after we split,
but never tried to get in contact with him.” During her pregnancy, Connie
watched the TV show Gunsmoke where the enchanting Burt Reynolds
played the role of Quint Asper. The young girl was enamored with the character
and decided to name her future child after him.
“But I wanted a more formal name than Quint. And then I was reading a Faulkner book, The Sound
and The Fury. The heroine’s name was Quentin, so I decided that my child was going to be
named Quentin whether it was male or female. I was also looking for a limited number of
nicknames, the shortest would be “Quent”, which I promptly shortened for “Q”. The name
by which most of his friends refer to him.” Connie married again when Q turned two. She
chose a musician named Kurt Zastoupil. Curt gave Quentin his last name and adopted
him. The family moved to Los Angeles where Quentin’s mother began a successful
career in pharmacology. Her career began to take off and they settled in South Bay,
one of the nicest neighborhoods of the city. His mother’s love for television and the cinema
seemed to genetically pass down to Quentin. He began to go to the movies before he could walk.
He was barely five when his mother would take him to movies like Carnal Knowledge and Deliverance.
While his peers were watching things like Dumbo, and The Jungle Book he was enjoying
The Wild Bunch and Midnight Cowboy. The child became consumed with films. He
rehearsed scenes from them with his toys and often pretended to be the hero from various
movies. This obsession was of no help at school. And though his IQ was a school-record-breaking
160, that didn’t seem to reflect in his grades. Teachers recognized his talent, but he was
terrible at writing and math. In addition, he was so restless and disobedient that the
school psychologist tried to convince Connie to start giving him sedatives. But she refused to do
that. The boy couldn’t tell the time, ride a bike or swim, but he could describe every film that he
had ever seen, say which actors were in them, who directed it and dreamed only of becoming an actor.
As the years passed nothing changed, and at 16, he dropped out of school with his mother’s blessing.
CONNIE MCHUGH “I could send him off every day and have him
hanging out on street corners or I could let him quit and I thought I’d actually have more
control over him if I let him stay at home. I wanted him to see that life without
an education would not be a picnic…” But a picnic, it was. Having reverted to his birth
father’s last name which was more compatible with a Hollywood career, he easily found work in the
film industry. He became a cashier in an adult movie theater. However, the dream of many
teens in the 70s didn’t resonate with him. He loved real films and considered pornos
to be cheap, disgusting, and boring. He spent his salary on acting classes. Q attended
James Best’s group, an actor who rose to fame thanks to the movies Shock Corridor and Verboten!.
Best’s method was simple, he wasn’t producing the next Sophia Loren or Marlon Brando, he was getting
his students ready for regular roles on TV, so the most important thing he taught
was how to behave naturally on camera. After finishing the class, he created his first
acting resume which was basically a few lines of bald-faced lies. For example, he had written that
he had played in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. This movie was chosen on purpose
because at the time it was impossible to double-check.
CHAPTER 2 Inglourious Writers
It was 1983. Quentin was already 20, but his career stubbornly refused to take
off. He had no idea then, that a random visit to a rental store called “Video Archives”
would cause his life to turn upside down. LANCE LAWSON
(Owner «Video Archives») “He came by as a film buff one day and
we started talking about movies and got into a discussion about Brian De Palma.
Four hours later we were still talking. He came back the next day and talked about
Sergio Leone. Eventually I offered him a job, working for 4$ an hour and with permission to sign
out as many videos as he liked free of charge”. QUENTIN TARANTINO
“Until I became a director it was the best job I ever had.”
The store made up for any film education that Quentin might have missed. Every day it
was filled with heated eight-hour discussions about film. Each participant was constantly
digging through the collection of nine thousand tapes in order to find just the right film and
prove their case. This was not the place where the customer was always right. In fact, just the
opposite, you could get insulted if you didn’t appreciate Scorsese or if you’d never heard of
François Truffaut. If you came intending to get Hercules in New York, Tarantino would force you
to get Blow Out. And instead of playing Disney cartoons or the latest Schwarzenegger film, the
store played pictures by Godard and John Woo. The run-down rental store became a haven for all
the cinephiles of Los Angeles, where young Quentin amazed the regulars with his phenomenal memory.
LANCE LAWSON “I always prided myself on my cinema knowledge
– who directed what, who starred in it, but Quentin knew all of that plus all of the details
– the supporting cast, who wrote the screenplay…” Thanks to these circumstances a small group of
like-minded companions formed around Quentin. Roger Avary a young director
working at Video Archives, Craig Hamann whom Quentin befriended while
attending James Best’s acting classes, and Rand Vossler who was a beginning screenwriter
and director and often visited the rental store. In those days Craig Hamann and Tarantino
were like brothers. Spending all of their free time together, they studied every Italian
and Chinese film they could get their hands on. Hamann suggested they combine their powers and
write a screenplay together which led to My Best Friend’s Birthday, Tarantino’s first film.
QUENTIN TARANTINO “That was the title of the very first script
I tried to write. I just wrote twenty pages of it. What you do when you try to write, it’s
like when you first start off, you start writing and you think it’s the greatest thing in the
world and then twenty or thirty pages into it, you come up with another idea it’s like… “Oh,
I can’t pay any attention to that, that is so obviously better”, and you keep doing that.”
The friends invested all their money in the creation of this picture. Ну, как средства.
Still, the budget was so small that Tarantino made up for any lacking actors and they filmed at
his mom’s house and a friend’s bar. The shooting team was made up of three people. Quentin,
the director, the administrator Roger Avary, and the cameraman Rand Vossler. The friends
threw all their energy into the production, hoping that this movie would help them get a
little attention and further their careers. But the film was never finished. The laboratory
where the film was being stored had a fire that destroyed the majority of the
footage. However, it was obvious from the few fragments that were saved that Tarantino’s
signature style had already begun to develop. The main source of this style was his own
personality. Q always wore black, ate hamburgers, read comics, and drove an old Honda Civic. His
phenomenal memory helped him find inspiration for dialogues just by overhearing conversations.
ROGER AVARY “Quentin has a mind for a dialogue.
He can repeat a conversation you’ve had ten or fifteen years ago verbatim.”
One of the best places for gathering information was prison where Quentin ended up 3 times. Each
time it was because of unpaid parking tickets. He was so distracted that he was fined three
thousand dollars in parking tickets alone. In 1984 Hamann introduced Tarantino to beginning
producer Cathryn Jaymes. She helped the young talent, who only had a short and falsified
resume under his belt to get at least some kind of work in cinema. 10 years later, Jaymes helped
produce Pulp Fiction. But back then, she was only able to help him get a cameo role in Golden
Girls where he played an Elvis impersonator. This episode was later included in a clip of the
show’s best moments and was often played on TV, thanks to which Quentin received
royalties every time it was aired. At the same time, Roger Avary
gave Quentin his script to read. Open Road was about a couple in love who ended
up on the wrong side of the law. Q liked it, and he spent a lot of time convincing Avary to finish
it. Roger was always busy and clearly burned out, so he asked Quentin to do it himself. He agreed,
and took the task very seriously. He got so into it that he quit his job at Video Archives
and moved back in with his mother. However, in order to pay his parking fines, he got a job
as a traveling salesman at Imperial Entertainment. His job was to sell cassettes to stores like
the one he worked for before. In a few months, there was almost nothing left of the original Open
Road, and Avary’s draft was used to create two screenplays True Romance and Natural Born Killers.
He finished True Romance first and decided to make the film himself since his acting career didn’t
seem to be going anywhere and the only way to get a part in a movie was to make it himself. Natural
Born Killers was written with one goal in mind, sell the script, and use the money to shoot
True Romance. Unfortunately, nobody wanted anything to do with either of the scripts.
Quentin didn’t give up and decided to rework an old idea about the robbery of a jewelry store.
Having completely devoted himself to his new work, Quentin first gave the rights to Natural Born
Killers to Rand Vossler, who had helped him make My Best Friend’s Birthday and later, thanks to
Cathryn Jaymes, sold True Romance to the American Screen Actors Guild for the minimum amount
allowed, 30 thousand dollars. As 1989 unfolded, he had money and was working on a new screenplay
called Reservoir Dogs. In order to avoid the same fate as his last projects, he decided not to spend
the money and set it aside money for shooting. Thanks to his first official sale, you could say
that Tarantino became a professional screenwriter in the eyes of Hollywood which led to his first
gig. Special effects expert Robert Kurtzman hired him to rewrite his script about vampires.
He offered him one-and-a-half thousand dollars and promised to help with special effects
on any of Quentin’s future projects. Tarantino agreed, and rewrote the whole thing.
That is how From Dusk Till Dawn came into being, but Kurtzman was unable to shoot it. At one point, Robert Englund who played Freddy Krueger
showed interest in it but later changed his mind. This became Quentin’s third project
which was resigned to gather dust on the shelf. When he received his next job, Quentin quit his
salesman job. For his work editing the dialogues in Past Midnight starring Rutger Hauer as
the lead, he was paid 8 thousand dollars. Though we wouldn’t call it editing, exactly.
QUENTIN TARANTINO “They hired me to do a dialogue polish and
it became like a page one rewrite. And then by the time they made the movie it became half
of my rewrite and half of the original script.” Thanks to After Midnight, Quentin’s name
appeared in the credits for the first time. About that time, Q befriended Scott Spiegel,
coauthor of the movie Evil Dead II. They met totally randomly when they struck up a
conversation in line at a movie theater. Spiegel was impressed by Quentin’s erudition
and invited him to a party at his house. When Scott heard the last name Tarantino, he
remembered another person with that last name, whose script True Romance he had recently read.
When Quentin told him that it was his work, Spiegel was amazed and promised him that no matter
what, he would help him make a movie. The next day he convinced Laurence Bender, the producer
of his latest film to work with Tarantino. That meeting became a turning
point for both their careers. Tarantino worked with Laurence as a producer
for the next 19 years. Bender immediately advised Quentin to focus on making Reservoir Dogs.
Tarantino finished the script in just three weeks and wanted to start shooting right away using the
money from True Romance and his friends as actors. But Bender asked Quentin for one year to seek
financing worthy of a professional movie. QUENTIN TARANTINO
“What happened was, I told Lawrence, "Look I'm gonna be writing this film. I'm gonna
start with it next month and I'm gonna be finished with it in a few days," and so I write it and
I finish it and I show it to him and he goes, "This is pretty good, why don't we try to get
this going as a real movie," and I go, "No, I've heard that all before. Forget it, I don't
trust that" ... I'd spent six years trying to get deals on films. No one was gonna give me a
job to make a new movie. No one was gonna take a chance and go, "Here's a million dollars,"
and so I took my destiny out of their hands. I had written two other scripts before that I
thought I was going to make, but this one, as I'm writing it, I knew I was gonna shoot a film on it.
I knew it. This was the one. This was achievable.” In the end, their contract was written down on a
bar napkin and stated that Quentin gave Bender two months to look for money. But within the week
events began to unfold with incredible speed. Laurence was a longtime student
of Peter Floor’s acting school, to whom he showed the Reservoir Dogs script. Fole
jokingly asked of all the actors on the planet, who Bender would choose for the main role.
He answered that the role would be perfect for Harvey Keitel. But here the jokes ended,
because it turned out Fole’s wife was a friend of Keitel and could send him the script anytime.
In a few days, Bender got a message on his voicemail saying that Harvey not only loved the
script and said that he must play the main role, but also promised to do everything to make
sure that the project received a budget and support from the studio.
With Keitel, Reservoir Dogs underwent a Cinderella transformation. After a
month of talks, the budget of the picture went from Quentin’s saved thirty thousand to one and a
half million from the company Live Entertainment. CHAPTER 3 (17:10)
Once upon a time… in Tarantino occupied Hollywood Throughout his career, Harvey Keitel
tried to trust amateur directors. He did so with Martin Scorsese first in Mean
Streets and later in Taxi, two films which paved the way for a new wave of American cinema.
Both are favorites of Tarantino by the way. But then his career took a dive beginning
with Francis Ford Coppola who personally threw him out of Apocalypse Now and replaced
him with Martin Sheen. And the main fiasco was his part in Saturn 3, where he got completely
dubbed over. Things started to get better just before he agreed to do Reservoir Dogs thanks
to his roles in The Last Temptation of Christ and Thelma and Louise. In short, the decision
to act for Tarantino was returning to his roots, working with young directors, and a big risk
for a career that had just started to level out. Of course, his name helped the movie. As soon
as the rumor that Keitel was going to be in Reservoir Dogs was confirmed, other stars
began to consider the project themselves. That’s why in the early stages Christopher Walken
expressed his interest, though later he changed his mind. Whereas Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, and
Tim Roth happily joined the project. Also, Samuel L. Jackson auditioned for the role of Holdaway,
but Tarantino chose Randy Brooks over him. That’s the story of how an unknown writer with no
directing experience, got a star-studded cast and one and a half million dollars. Quentin needed to
get some experience before he started shooting, so in June of 1991, he went to the Sundance
Festival, which provided dozens of masterclasses combining amateur cinematographers with stars
of the industry. That’s where Quentin and Steve Buscemi filmed a few practice scenes for Reservoir
Dogs. They showed them to more experienced colleagues who considered Tarantino’s style, for
lack of a better word, childish. Static shots, the camera lying on the floor, and lack of varied
perspectives caused them to laugh with contempt. The only person who was inspired by the work and
gave a lot of helpful advice was Terry Gilliam. As a result, Tarantino thanked him by including
Gilliam’s name in the credits of the film. The film was shot in the poor suburbs of
Los Angeles. But the heart of all the action became a real abandoned funeral home. Hardly
anyone notices, but in this scene, for example, Michael Madsen is sitting on a
hearse, surrounded by coffins, and the conversation between Harvey Keitel and
Steve Buscemi happens in an embalming room. When all the locations had been found,
there was little left to do. After a week of rehearsals on the 29th of July,
1991, they began filming Reservoir Dogs. The greatest challenge during
the five-week shooting process was reserved for Tim Roth. He had to lie in a
puddle of fake blood for up to ten hours a day. By the evening the syrup and dye concoction
thickened, and he had to literally be scraped off the floor. At one point Quentin
considered replacing Tim with a doll, but the actor insisted that he would
lie there as long as necessary. This iconic torture scene was created thanks
to Robert Kurtzman who hadn’t forgotten about his promise to help with special effects in
exchange for the script From Dusk Till Dawn. While shooting, Quentin realized that
he hadn’t given Mr. Blue a single line, so he rewrote the opening scene in a diner between
takes. As for the discussion, when Quentin’s character explains the hidden meaning of Madonna’s
“Like A Virgin”, he seriously thought that he had guessed her subliminal message. After the film
came out, he met with Madonna and asked her if he had guessed correctly. She answered, “no”
but that she really liked his interpretation. During editing, Quentin met Harvey Weinstein for
the first time. Their partnership which was more like a bickering couple would continue for another
27 years. Back then, Harvey insisted that they cut the torture scene from the film. This argument
continued for a while, but the director remained unmoved and continued to demonstrate that no
one was going to tell him how to make a movie. As for the scene, he slightly regretted leaving it
in because many would describe the film by saying “you know, that movie where the cop gets his ear
cut off”. The scene sparked much discussion and was the reason that it wasn’t released on
cassette in Great Britain and was viciously attacked by several publications. The newspaper
Today stated that the scene should have been cut, along with every other scene, maintaining that the
work was nothing more than violence propaganda. Quentin accepted these attacks with a smile, like
Michael Madsen who used to say that Mr. Blonde was the most positive persona in the movie.
MICHAEL MADSEN “I mean, I didn't find Mr Blonde that bad
a guy ... I couldn't understand why people cheered when he was shot. I would have thought
they'd be sorry to see him go, especially as he gets shot by a rat. He didn't bullshit anybody,
he just wanted to tell the truth, hurhurhur.” But Madsen wasn’t the only one
affected by comments about his role, Steve Buscemi said that after the monologue
about tips, he had to tip generously for life. STEVE BUSCEMI
“Recently I forgot to tip a cab driver and I thought, "Oh my God, if he
sees the movie, he's gonna say, 'That's the guy…’ Mr. Pink’s monologue was based on a real time
in Tarantino’s life, which his friends would often remember with distaste, since first he
spent several years telling them about it, and then even immortalized his nonsense on film.
Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Festival. It received so many glowing reviews there, that a
month later at Cannes, the film was pegged to be a revelation. Later, at the film festival in Toronto
Reservoir Dogs received the prize for best film, and Quentin met Robert Rodriguez who had brought
his El Mariachi, which had been filmed for only seven thousand dollars. The directors quickly
found common ground, and became best friends, but more on that later. Meanwhile, Reservoir
Dogs was released and made 3 million dollars in the USA. This may seem unimpressive
at first, but if you consider that the film was only shown in 26 theaters the first
week, this number is more than adequate. In Great Britain it was shown at 10 theaters and
made 100 thousand pounds on opening weekend. The picture smoothly gained momentum and by the
beginning of 1993, it was on everybody’s lips. Reservoir Dogs was considered to be the best
directing debut since the times of Citizen Kane. But there was a downside to all the attention.
Quentin was accused multiple times of plagiarism. And while the influence of French New Wave
cinema could be read between the lines, the number of similarities with the Hong Kong
action movie City on Fire was truly suspicious. Here’s what happens in one of
the scenes of the film. A gang of robbers with the code names Brother Jo,
Brother Chu, Brother Fu, and Brother Nam, run, after they fail to steal a diamond. The
job was ruined because one of the robbers, a psychopath, started shooting. The police were
lying in wait, tipped off by Brother Chu who was undercover for the cops. During the escape Brother
Chu is saved by the more seasoned Brother Fu, who in turn provokes Brother Chu when he
unloads two cartridges of bullets onto the cops’ windshield. Brother Chu kills an innocent witness
and is wounded in the stomach. Fu takes him to the meeting point at an abandoned warehouse. Fearing
that they were betrayed, he calls in the big boss. The Boss declares that Chu is a cop
and turns the barrel of his gun on him. Fu reacts because he thinks Chu is innocent
and gets out his gun too. The next scene finds them in a belligerent standoff. Look familiar?
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that this is only a twenty-minute segment of City on Fire.
And though the connection can’t be ignored, the style, dialogue and plot structure of the
films are completely different. But of course, this topic was too good for journalists to pass up
at press conferences. At the Cannes Film Festival Tarantino gave the press a clear answer.
QUENTIN TARANTINO “I love City On Fire and I have the poster for it
framed in my house. It's a great movie. I steal from every movie. I steal from every single
movie ever made. I love it. If my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and
that from that and mixing them together and if people don't like them then tough titty, don't
go and see it, alright. I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages.”
Many were not satisfied by this explanation, but Quentin completely unarmed the critics with his
candor which only added to his popularity. Cathryn Jaymes was receiving calls from every agent,
every producer, and every studio representative, who were asking for Tarantino’s previous
screenplays. She sent them the same works which had been lying around their offices for
years unread, despite her having begged them to read them earlier. It’s no surprise then
that right after the release of Reservoir Dogs they started work on True Romance and Natural Born
Killers. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back during the masterclasses at the Sundance
Institute Tarantino had met Tony Scott. Tony had been wanting to make a crime-action film and
offered to buy the rights to Reservoir Dogs, but Tarantino refused and asked him to read True
Romance instead. He read it in one evening and by the next day had used all his connections to buy
the rights and find a 30 million dollar budget. He also got Roger Avary to join the project since
the first version of the screenplay was his. Roger tweaked the screenplay a little to fit the
director’s needs and also rewrote the finale. Tony knew that it had upset Quentin, since his
ending was gloomy and depressing, whereas Scott’s happy end was a compromise with Hollywood’s
expectations of a commercial film. But in fact, the director made two versions of the finale and
chose the one which he believed worked the best. Tarantino never publicly shared his disappointment
and called his work on True Romance exceptional. QUENTIN TARANTINO
“I think by far he's the better guy to have done this movie and also
it was exciting, the idea of seeing my world through Tony's eyes and have it look like that.”
True Romance was produced by a company created by Quentin and Laurence Bender called “A Band
Apart”, named after the Jean-Luc Goddard film Bande à part. Later the company
worked on all of Tarantino’s films and partnered with Robert Rodriguez, John Woo,
Tim Burton, Darren Aronofsky, and Luc Besson. After the premiere of True Romance
Quentin helped to promote the picture by going on the promo tour. And though he
wasn’t being paid for that, he went to great lengths to ensure the film’s success at the box
office. However, with Natural Born Killers it was a different story.
QUENTIN TARANTINO “My name'll get brought up from time to time but
I think I've done a pretty good job of distancing myself from the film. Basically, if you like
it, it's all Oliver. Good, bad or indifferent, it has very little to do with me.”
To this day Tarantino has not seen the film and doesn’t want to discuss it. From the moment that
the screenplay made it into Oliver Stone’s hands, a quiet war began between the two directors.
As you may remember, Tarantino had given the rights for Natural Born Killers to his friend
Rand Vossler, who had spent the last four years trying to make the movie and dreamed of directing
it himself. Quentin had named only one condition. Rand was to shoot a small excerpt so that Quentin
could make sure that their vision was the same. At that stage, Vossler had begun to collaborate with
Don Murphy who promised him 3 million dollars for the budget. According to Tarantino, Vossler signed
a contract with him, and three days later was removed as director and made co-producer instead.
Having gotten his hands on the screenplay, Murphy passed it to Oliver Stone, who pretty much
rewrote the whole thing along with his colleagues. Tarantino was furious and said several times that
everyone who was part of creating that film just wanted to use his newfound glory. Murphy countered
by saying that he would never bet on a director who’s Reservoir Dogs made less at the box office
than Leprechaun. In another interview, Murphy explained that they had to rewrite the screenplay
because like all of Tarantino’s screenplays, it seemed to be made up only of expletives.
Similar quips and snide comments continued for more than a year, until both sides came to an
agreement, whereby Tarantino would stop airing his discontent in exchange for a tidy sum. He also
insisted that his name not appear in the credits, though it ended up there anyway. A humble line
read “story by Quentin Tarantino”. Thanks to the agreement Quentin made more than half a million
dollars in royalties on this project. Oliver Stone thought it was incredibly hypocritical to sever
all ties with the film but then agree to receive royalties and a percentage of the profit. He was
also incredibly displeased when he found out that Quentin had told the actors from Reservoir
Dogs that if they ever worked with Stone, they would never work with him again.
The story reached its climax with the release of a non-fiction book entitled Killer Instinct
which told the story of the creation of Natural Born Killers. Within the pages, it’s easy to find
dozens of jabs and insults pointed at Quentin with most quotes belonging to Jane Hamsher.
JANE HAMSHER If Quentin didn’t agree with what was published in
my book, he should have taken his grievances to a court of law, that’s the civilized recourse
society has provided for disagreements.”
But Quentin didn’t take him to court. On the 22nd
of November 1997, in a Los Angeles restaurant, he beat Murphy up. He was stopped by the police
on his way out, but Don didn’t press charges. The conflict was mediated by Miramax co-founder Harvey
Weinstein who convinced the enemies to shake on it. But a few days later, Tarantino went on the
Keenan Ivory Wayne’s Show and gladly described, in detail, how he’d bitch-slapped Murphy. Don’s
reaction was predictable. He sued Tarantino and demanded 5 million dollars in moral damages. The
case was rejected and both sides agreed to stop talking dirt about each other.
But let’s go back to 1992. After the premiere of Reservoir Dogs Quentin spent
six months in Amsterdam. The first few months he did what everyone does in Amsterdam. Later,
Roger Avary joined him, and they started work on the screenplay that would later beсome Pulp
Fiction. Quentin already had in his hands the proposal for his next project with a budget of at
least a million dollars. This happened thanks to Danny DeVito who was devastated at not being able
to participate in the making of Reservoir Dogs. Later Danny would make studios pay just to read a
new Tarantino script and later became the producer for Pulp Fiction helping Quentin to receive an
eight-and-a-half-million dollar budget. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, the screenwriters had come up
with something epic. They took all the drafts and decided to combine them into a new project. First,
Avary’s Chaos Rules the World became the golden watch scene. They also added a deleted scene
with the soiled car interior from True Romance, a perfected story about a date, and a dialogue
that never made it into Natural Born Killers about robbing diners. By mid-1993, they had
finished. Quentin asked Avary to continue working on the movie with him, but Roger
needed money fast because he wanted to get married and to shoot his own film Killing
Zoe, so he sold the rights to Pulp Fiction. The rights were bought immediately by Miramax
Studios and Tarantino began preparations for shooting. He was able to get almost the whole
Reservoir Dogs team. Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, producer Laurence Bender, creative
director and designer David and Sandy Wasco, operator Andrzej Sekuła (who after a severe
accident filmed Pulp Fiction from a wheelchair), and his irreplaceable helper and
main supporter, editor Sally Menke. Then he began casting the other roles. The main
hero was to be Vic Vega who’s part was written for Michael Madsen who rejected the role in favor
of playing opposite Kevin Costner in Wyatt Earp. Later, he would come to regret that decision. The
character was turned into Vic’s brother Vincent, and producer Laurence Bender was planning on
inviting Daniel Day-Lewis to play the part, but Quentin had an idea, which caused
everyone to think him bat crazy. Yes, now it’s difficult to imagine
anyone else playing Vincent Vega, but by 1993 no one was taking John
Travolta seriously anymore. In the 70s, the head of Disney Studios Michael Eisner called
him the biggest star on the planet, since he had been nominated for an Oscar for Saturday Night
Fever and starred in the cult favorite Grease. However, a series of unfortunate decisions
led him to act in films like Chains of Gold, The Experts, and Look Who’s Talking.
QUENTIN TARANTINO 'As much as I like John Travolta, I couldn't
bring myself to watch some fucking talking baby movie.'
People had stopped taking Travolta seriously, but Tarantino saw genius in him. In one of
his favorite films Blow Out by Brian de Palma, Travolta put on what Quentin would call one of the
best acting performances in the history of cinema. From their first meeting it was clear - fate
brought them together. When he stepped into Tarantino’s cluttered apartment, Travolta,
who owned a 20-bedroom mansion in Maine, apartments in Florida, and three personal
jets, was shocked. Quentin was living at the same apartment that John had rented when
he first arrived in Los Angeles in 1974. After Tarantino spent several hours
quoting lines from Travolta’s movies, played “Grease” the board game with him, and
showed him the complete collection of his films, John accepted the offer to play Vincent Vega.
To Tarantino’s surprise the decision to cast Travolta was not met with universal applause. It
even became the reason why the heads of Miramax started to doubt their investment in the project.
Even Laurence Bender was unsure in the beginning. LAURENCE BENDER
“You can get anybody in the world, why do you want John Travolta?”
But Tarantino didn’t budge. It was Travolta, or no one, and he even told the producers that
he wouldn’t make the film if John wasn’t in it. Once again, under pressure from Quentin,
the producers and the studio backed off. Later, thanks to Keitel the cast was joined
by his neighbor, Bruce Willis. Turns out, he was a fan of Reservoir Dogs and could
quote any line from it. Though Quentin had initially hoped to get Sylvester Stallone to
play Butch, he was so impressed with Willis’s enthusiasm that he chose him, giving yet
another actor’s career a second wind. Pulp Fiction allowed critics to see
Bruce for the first time as more than… As for Samuel L. Jackson, despite having a role
written specifically for him, he almost jumped ship when he came to a reading only to find it was
an audition with another candidate, Paul Calderon, who initially got the part. After that Samuel
went to see Tarantino in person and read him the monologue from the Bible, adding in some of his
own improvisations. His skill amazed the director so much that Tarantino cast him in almost all
of his films, and never made him audition again. As for those who didn’t make it into the
film, it’s worth mentioning that Ellen DeGeneres auditioned for the role which
was eventually played by Rosanna Arquette. Finally, having read the screenplay
to Uma Thurman over the phone, and convincing her to participate, on the 20th of
September, 1993 he began shooting Pulp Fiction. Filming had started and still, Quentin was
choosing who he was going to play. Though he saw himself as Lance the drug dealer, he decided on
playing the anxious Jimmy, thinking that he wanted to be on the other side of the camera in the final
scene: Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's wife. The scenes involving Tarantino
were directed by Robert Rodriguez. When one thinks of Pulp Fiction one
instantaneously pictures the interior of the Jack Rabbit Slim’s restaurant. The decorations
for it cost one hundred thousand dollars. No wonder the milkshakes were so expensive.
On a serious note, besides the obvious references, there were a few more interesting ones.
The walls of the restaurant were hung with posters of Roger Corman’s films, one of
Tarantino’s favorite directors. The waiter played by Steve Buscemi looks like one of
Quentin’s favorite musicians - Buddy Holly, and the tables made of cars were
borrowed from the movie Speedway starring Elvis Presley. By the way, the same
building that was home to Jack Rabbit Slim’s also housed Butch’s hotel room, the
room which Vincent and Jules enter, and the basement of the Mason Dixie Pawnshop. It
was from the parking lot of this very building, during filming, that Quentin’s car was stolen.
The same car which Vincent drives in the movie. 20 years later, a policeman found it
accidentally when he stopped two teens who were stealing it from its new owner who
had no idea that he had spent the last 15 years riding around in Quentin Tarantino’s car.
In Pulp Fiction Quentin included more references than in any other of his works. Vince and Mia’s
dance was a reference to Eight and a Half, Butch and Marcell’s meeting –
Psycho, and the glowing case was from Kiss Me Deadly. As for the dialogues,
half of the movie was references to other films, the most important of which was Jules’
sermon which practically copied Karate Kiba. Considering the result of the premiere
which occurred at Cannes in May of 1994, it’s hard to believe that the film only
cost eight and a half million dollars. Hell, just Bruce Willis’s paycheck for Die Hard 2
was bigger than the whole budget for Pulp Fiction. A few days later Quentin received
the Grand Prize of the film festival. Cannes started a chain reaction. The movie
received awards from the Film Critics Association for best picture, best directing, best
screenplay, best acting done by John Travolta, as well as Golden Globe and a BAFTA for
best screenplay, as well as seven Oscar nominations. Best Picture, Best Actor, Best
Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Director, Screenplay, and Film Editing. But at the 67th
Academy Awards Ceremony Pulp Fiction together with The Shawshank Redemption were victims of
the sweeping success that was Forrest Gump. It was one of the most predictable battles
for the Oscars. But Pulp Fiction did get a statuette for Best Original Screenplay.
Remarkably, Quentin and Roger Avary became two of the ten youngest Oscar
winners in that category. And their acceptance speech is considered to be one
of the best in the history of the Oscars. CHAPTER 4
Revenge of the Giant Fame While he was working on Pulp Fiction, Quentin had
agreed to play in a few of his friend’s movies. Of course, if he had known how much attention would
be drawn to his film and to himself, he probably wouldn’t have done it, but since he had promised,
he couldn’t back out now. Filming the cameo roles for Rory Kelly’s Sleep with Me and Alexandre
Rockwell’s Somebody to Love took less than a day. The same can be said for the phenomenal
moment in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, however, for his role in Destiny Turns on the
Radio he had to set aside several weeks right in the middle of the promo tour of his own film.
That was the moment when Pulp Fiction became a box office success, making over 200 million
dollars and having broken even 25 times over. At the end of ’94 Quentin and a few of his close
friends, Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell, and Allison Anders collaborated on a film
called Four Rooms. There were supposed to be five rooms, but Richard Linklater, the fifth
in the group declined to film his episode. Things didn’t work out with the lead
actor either. All the directors wrote their episodes with Steve Buscemi in mind, but
he was too busy and was replaced by Tim Roth. The episode shot by Quentin was a retelling of
a story from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which the characters themselves openly admit to. Besides
Tim Roth, the main roles were played by Tarantino, Paul Calderon whom Quentin hired as a kind of
apology for not giving him the role of Jules, and Bruce Willis. An interesting fact about
Bruce: when he played the part for free, he broke the rules of the Actors Guild, and
because of that wasn’t mentioned in the credits. Speaking of the credits, they’re
almost the best thing about the movie. Unfortunately, complete failure awaited the
film. Critics tore it apart, dubbing it the main disappointment of the year. Alexandre
Rockwell and Allison Anders’ episodes were dragged through the dirt, and though Tarantino
and Rodriguez were not quite so unfortunate, it still didn’t help the picture to
break even, becoming the first and only financial train wreck in Quentin’s career.
But, there was no time to grieve, since in 1999, six years after it was written, the screenplay
for From Dusk Till Dawn was finally approved. Having decided to focus on the role of Richard
Gecko, Quentin asked Robert Rodriguez to take the director’s chair. Miramax gave the project a
19-million-dollar budget, which was more than all the duo’s previous film budgets combined. That was
how the friends received complete creative freedom and began to cast actors for the main roles.
The first to be picked were Quentin and Rodriguez’s friends, Harvey Keitel, Juliette
Lewis, Danny Trejo, and Cheech Marin. Later, as a nod to “B” movies, roles were
given to B movie star Fred Williamson and makeup artist Tom Savini who had worked
on Friday the 13th and Dawn of the Dead. Next, Robert Rodriguez brought Selma Hayek to
the project, who initially kept rejecting the proposal because of her fear of snakes. Rodriguez
even lied, saying that he’d offered the part to Madonna, after which Selma went to two months
of psychotherapy to get rid of her phobia. However, the biggest challenge was finding someone
to play Seth Gecko. Quentin offered the part to John Travolta, Michael Madsen, and Christopher
Walken. Robert offered it to Antonio Banderas, but everyone had a reason for turning it
down. But while Tarantino was filming the final episodes of ER as a guest director, he
met George Clooney and offered him the part. From Dusk Till Dawn became his big-screen debut.
There are a few interesting facts worth mentioning, one of which is the wonderful
reference to cheap films of the 80s, where one actor was often used to
play several different characters, and another is that Jules’ monologue from
Pulp Fiction was initially written for the head of the Fuller family, and of course, the
reference to the screenwriter’s own foot fetish. Thanks to the role of Richard Gekko, Quentin
found himself in the company of Val Kilmer, Burt Reynolds, and Marlon Brando. All
of these actors were nominated for a Golden Raspberry for Worst
Supporting Actor in ’96. Nonetheless, I consider it to be the best
performance of Tarantino’s acting career. He was able to bring to the screen a
real psychopath without exaggerated grimaces and pages of text which he usually
hid behind. Years later, many critics began to observe that his performance was
one of the highlights of the movie. The picture was released in January of ’96 and led
the box office its opening weekend, but then lost momentum, collecting around 30 million dollars.
This number was a disappointment for Miramax studios which had high hopes for the project.
The press didn’t help the picture either; it not only criticized Tarantino but found fault with
Rodriguez and Clooney as well. But, as always, time will tell, since Dusk Till Dawn became a cult
classic which entertains movie lovers to this day. And though Quentin’s acting skills were
subject to vicious attacks, his ability to write scripts was never in question. So as
soon as Quentin finished filming, Tony Scott invited him to help with the dialogues for Crimson
Tide starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. QUENTIN TARANTINO
“The one thing is some of the dialogue was just a little like "normal" movie
dialogue. It had its brain, it just needed a bit more of a heart, so I took it and did a rewrite on
it, although I actually didn't change any scenes. I just changed the dialogue, just tried
to bring more characterization out.” Despite a few setbacks, interest in Tarantino
grew. And the question “what would be the writer’s next big picture” tormented all of Hollywood’s
news outlets. His opponents never missed an opportunity to mention that his previous
works were co-written with Roger Avary, and that without him, Quentin couldn’t produce
a single line. The pressure grew when he rejected the offers to direct Speed and Men in
Black. It was only by the end of 1996 that he announced that his next project would be a screen
adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel, Rum Punch. Having bought the rights to the novel a few
years back, the director nursed the idea for several years, making lots of changes to the
original source. He switched the location from Florida to his familiar Los Angeles, changed
the skin color and last name of the heroine, the name of the movie to Jackie Brown,
and of course spiced up the dialogue. He made so many changes that for more than a
year he was afraid to show the screenplay to the book’s author. But when Elmore read
it, he told Tarantino that it was the best script he had read in his life.
Emboldened by the author’s support, at the beginning of 1997 Quentin
began casting the main roles. Pam Grier was an obvious choice for him. When the
actress came to the audition, Quentin’s office walls had been hung with her posters.
PAM GRIER “And I said, 'Did you put these up because I
was coming over?' And he said, 'No. I was gonna take them down because you were coming over!”
He also desperately wanted to work with Robert Forster. They met back in ’91 when Robert
came to audition for the part of Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs but Tarantino chose Lawrence
Tierney while promising Forster that their paths would definitely cross. Six years later
he met him at a restaurant and offered him a role which brought the actor his first
Oscar nomination and resurrected his career. It’s weird that no nominations were given to De
Niro, who played a very atypical role for himself, or to Samuel L. Jackson whose performance makes
your blood run cold. Take the scene with Chris Tucker for example. As for Chris Tucker, soon
after this small role in Tarantino’s film, Tucker got famous and for a time became one
of the highest-paid actors in the world. Quentin often expressed his disappointment
with the lack of nominations for Grier, saying that she deserved to become the first
black actress to receive an Oscar for a lead role. By that time, Tarantino’s ability to breathe new
life into an actor’s deflated career had become legendary. He was often interrogated
about who he was going to save next. QUENTIN TARANTINO
“I’m not coming from that place. I’m trying to cast the
best actors or the coolest actors in whatever role. And I’m just not using
the hot star list in order to do it.” Jackie Brown premiered on the 29th of December
1997 and made 10 million the first weekend, while having a budget of 12 million. In total,
the picture made it to the 74 million mark. It wasn’t the success of Pulp Fiction it wasn’t
a failure, though that’s exactly how Quentin felt about it. In addition to the lack of nominations
for Best Director and Best Screenplay, the less than exuberant reviews were what pulled the
rug out from under him. He reacted aggressively to news headlines like “the grossly overrated
Tarantino” saying that it was the press that had spent the last five years overestimating him in
the first place. To describe what he was feeling, it would be enough to say that his next
movie would come out only six years later. A few months after the premiere of Jackie Brown,
Quentin made another attempt to make it as an actor in the play Wait Until Dark with Marisa
Tomei. The Broadway premiere ended with a standing ovation. In the audience were many of Tarantino’s
fans and colleagues and it seemed that a play with 3 million dollars in presale tickets was bound
to be a success, and become a Broadway sensation. And it did. In the reviews the next day, the
critics attacked Quentin with such ferocity that it eclipsed all the bad press that
he had received during his whole career. And though Tarantino parried the blows with
scathing comments back at his opponents, he was not prepared for the battle against the
theater critics. Two months later, having played the required amount of shows, he left Broadway.
After this series of unfortunate events, shattered and upset, Quentin Tarantino shut
himself up in a small apartment and began to write a new script. The nameless project was about
the second world war, combining three stories, none of which had a finale. Unable to overcome
his writing block Tarantino left the bustle of New York and Los Angeles and spent a year and a half
in Austin, Texas, resigned to smoking marijuana, drinking, and watching thousands of films
in the company of his faithful friends, Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, and
Mike Judge. However, he quickly tired of the pointless waste of time and founded an annual
festival called QT, where he would show favorite movies from his gigantic collection, and tell
stories of forgotten, unrecognized directors, and present new pictures of unknown
filmmakers from around the world. In 2000 Quentin returned to
Los Angeles to act in the comedy Little Nicky, where he played the Deacon.
During the visit to LA, he went to a party hosted by Miramax and bumped into Uma Thurman. They
started reminiscing about making Pulp Fiction and the actress reminded Quentin that once he had come
into her trailer with the idea for a screenplay. She remembered that the story was based on
François Truffaut’s film The Bride Wore Black. It was about a female murderer, who was shot at in a
clocktower by a gang led by Bill, but she survived and wanted revenge. That evening Thurman asked
him the most important question of her career:
