INTERVIEW BY MICHEL CIMENT and HUBERT NIOGRET
Positif | May 23, 1994

POSITIF: The scenario of Pulp Fiction owes its origins to some stories by Roger Avary and you. What was involved? 
QUENTIN TARANTINO: The idea for Pulp Fiction was born even before I began writing Reservoir Dogs. I was trying to imagine how to make a film without money, so I thought of a short I’d be able to show at festivals that could be a kind of calling card. I’d be able to demonstrate what I was capa­ble of, which would allow me to shoot a feature-length film. So I thought of the story of Vincent Vega and Marsellus’s wife.

Then I realized, why not write a second short crime story, and then a third, and then shoot them one after another when I got enough money together, and then put them together? That’s pretty much what Jim Jarmusch did with Stranger Than Paradise, showing one part at one festival, then getting the financial backing to do the second, etc.

So I phoned my friend Roger Avary to ask him to write the second story, but with the condition that it had to be the most classic story possible; and from there he could take us to the moon! And that’s what he wrote: the one about the boxer who gets knocked out in the ring. The third story was going to be the one of Reservoir Dogs. But then our enthusiasm kind of died down, that project never got done, and I used the story of Dogs for my feature-length film.

Later we came back to the project, but abandoned the idea of an anthol­ogy. What I really wanted was to make a novel on the screen, with characters who enter and exit, who have their own story but who can appear anywhere. I could get to do what a contemporary writer does: introduce into his book a secondary character who appeared in an earlier book, something like the Glass family that Salinger imagined, and whose members you find move from one novel to the next.

This is a register filmmakers simply don’t work in: in Hollywood, when you make a film for, let’s say, Paramount, you sell them the rights to the story. If you make the next one for Warners, you can’t use the same char­acters because they were created for another company.

With Pulp Fiction, I wanted in some sense to make three films for the price of one! I liked that each character of Pulp Fiction could carry a film as the main hero. If I’d made a film, for example, about Butch and Fabienne and only about them, the character played by John Travolta probably wouldn’t have had a name. He’d have been called “Bad Guy No. i.” But as Pulp Fiction is conceived, he is Vincent Vega. We know his personality, we have an idea of his way of life, he’s not simply a minor character. So then when they shoot him, the spectator feels something.

POSITIF: So, when going to write Pulp Fiction, the feature, you already had two stories, Vincent Vega’s and the boxer’s? 
TARANTINO: Right, and I didn’t know what the third story would be until I was half way through the scenario. While rewriting the story of the boxer, I said to myself: “Why not end the morning with Jules and Vincent instead of having them separate after the shooting?” Their characters seemed to me to have rounded out a lot and I felt that with them I had my third story. So I followed them instead of leaving them there. I also knew that at the end I would reintroduce Pumpkin and Honey Bunny to wrap up the story. I had created a universe of a certain dimension, into which I was going to integrate the story of the boxer which Roger Avary had written.

There are a bunch of ideas that belong to him: the hillbillies, the pawn­broker. He had invented the watch, for example, but I had to make up the history of this watch. I also made Fabienne into a French woman. These pieces of the puzzle came together during the writing of the scenario, but during the editing, we continued moving the pieces around.

When I start writing, I know more or less where I’m going. It’s not like I have a map, but instead as if I were following tips that a friend had given me for my itinerary and that I had noted down. You go by McDonald’s, and then you drive for a few miles and then you see a big tree. Then you know you’re going in the right direction. Then you get to a mountain with a sculpture carved in the rock, so you have to turn left. You go over several hills, and finally you reach a very long stone bridge.

This analogy is a pretty good indication of how I work: with a series of markers. I set out on a trip in my car, and my characters never stop telling stories, and moving the scenario along, while I keep glancing out the win­dow to pay attention to the route markers. The strange thing is that, working in the organic way I do, knowing my story as I do, I still discover it as I write it. I could never write the sequences separately and then dis­tribute them through my scenario. I need to clear a path through the material, each episode leading to the next. I overlap things, make connec­tions, bring things together in a process which I experience simultaneously as emotional and intellectual.

POSITIF: Your dialogue has a very particular vitality and rhythm which one associates with comic actors like the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields or Woody Allen, who would try them out in nightclubs. How did you go about gauging their impact?
TARANTINO: I know they’re going to work by measuring their impact on me, on their ability to make me laugh! If I think they’re funny, I think others will have the same reaction. But giving them to an actor is a good test. You can write a line of dialogue you think is side-splitting, but acted it won’t work at all. But in general I’m my own guide. If I read my script to someone else, I can immediately tell what’s not working. It’s pretty much the same thing with directing.

I don’t believe at all in test screenings or sneak previews where you hand out questionnaires to the viewers to get their reactions. Although I like to show my films to the public, we didn’t do any research of this kind, on certain ages or groups, for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I had it put in my contract that there would be no marketing studies. Any director will tell you that you don’t need questionnaires to find out what spectators are feeling. When you see your film for the first time surrounded by all these unknown viewers, you know immediately all you need to know: if it’s funny or not, if it’s too slow or too fast, if it’s moving or not, if you’ve lost your viewers and if you’ll find them again.

I don’t give a damn about the specific problems such and such a viewer will have with a particular scene or character. I don’t care what they think as individuals, what interests me is how they react as an audience. At that moment, there is no critic who could be more severe than myself towards my work.

POSITIF: While you were creating the characters did you think about the actors who would play them?
TARANTINO: In some cases, yes, but not always. I wrote the part of Jules for Samuel Jackson, and of course Honey Bunny and Pumpkin for Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth, who is one of my best friends. They are friends in real life, and when I ran into them one night at a party I was struck with a director’s intuition: their size, their look, their energy, everything about them made me want to use them together in my film. I’ve also always been a fan of Sam’s. I knew he gave off an incredible feeling of power and that, if given the possibility, he could express this Richard III side of him­self that he has in the film. There are not a lot of actors who can dominate a scene, move people around the room like pawns in a chess game without even standing up, just sitting there. And that’s what Sam does in Pulp Fic­tion.

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POSITIF: How do you answer critics who think that your generation, with Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, or even an older person like David Lynch is just mak­ing borrowed, post-modern, self-reflexive art with no connection to reality, just a kind of formalist game?
TARANTINO: I’m never bothered that people say I don’t make films “from life” and that I have “nothing to say.” I don’t try to say anything but to create characters and to tell stories out of which meaning can appear. What’s more, I think I make films about life since I make films about me, about what interests me.

The only artistic training I had was as an actor. An actor has a very dif­ferent aesthetic conception from a director or a writer. He uses what works. Without betraying the truth of my style, my rhythm or voice, when I saw something I liked in Marlon Brando or Michael Caine, I’d use it in my own acting. Actors work like this: they steal from others and make it part of themselves.

I don’t consider myself just as a director, but as a movie man who has the whole treasure of the movies to choose from and can take whatever gems I like, twist them around, give them new form, bring things together that have never been matched up before. But that should never become referential to the point of stopping the movement of the film. My first concern is to tell a story that will be dramatically captivating. What counts is that the story works and that viewers will be caught up in my film. Then movie buffs can find additional pleasure in getting whatever allusions there are.

But I never try for an exact copy or a precise quote or a specific refer­ence. Carbon copies give me headaches. I like mixing things up: for example that golden watch story begins in the spirit of Body and Soul and then unexpectedly ends up in the climate of Deliverance. What I most enjoy are space-time distortions, jumps from one world to another. You don’t need to know the two films to appreciate the story of the watch, but if you know them it’s even more surprising and fun.

Sometimes I have an idea for a film which I carry around in my head for five or six years, without writing the scenario, since the right moment hasn’t hit. But when I sit down to write, everything that’s going on in my personal life finds a place in the film. When I’ve finished a scenario, I’m always astonished by what it reveals about me. It’s as if I were disclosing a bunch of personal secrets, even though people don’t notice, and I don’t really care if they notice or not!

Again, if an actor is driving to the theater or to a film set and hits a dog, like Irene Jacob did in Red, well, it’s going to affect the acting, no matter how well the scene has been prepared. What happened is going to show up on stage or on the screen. Anyone able to keep strictly to what had been planned isn’t really creative. At least that’s how I think about my work. Whatever happens to me, even if it’s completely unrelated to the subject I’m doing, will find its way into the scenes I’m shooting, because I want my characters’ hearts to really beat.

If you really knew me, you would be surprised by how much my films talk about me.

INTERVIEW BY GAVIN SMITH
FILM COMMENT | JULY-AUGUST 1994

SMITH: Have you ever been forced to patch a scene or moment together in the cutting room because it didn’t work the way you shot it?
TARANTINO: Part of my job if I do something like that is to know I got it when we’re on the set. If you get to the editing room and it absolutely didn’t work, then you’ll still make it work. Sometimes you have a great sequence but with a stumble, and you got to fix that stumble.

Other scenes I know that I’m gonna shoot from a zillion different angles because in the editing room I want to be able to completely pop around and cut to performance. People think you shoot a lot of different angles just because you’re doing action. That’s true, but the thing is, it’s also a big performance thing. When you look at the way Tony Scott did the Christopher Walken-Dennis Hopper scene in True Romance, a million different angles, but it’s all cut to a performance rhythm.

SMITH: I tend to associate that kind of coverage with a lack of directorial point of view.
TARANTINO: When Tony does it, it’s not a willy nilly thing, that’s just how he shoots. His whole style is to have a cut every 15 seconds.

SMITH: Can’t stand that.
TARANTINO: Yeah, but when you say you can’t stand that, you’re reacting against his aesthetic—but that’s what he wants to do. Me, I like to hold for as long as I can before I have to cut, and then when I do cut, I want it to fucking mean something. At the same time, I love how Tony does it. The whole sequence in Pulp Fiction where Sam Jackson and John Travolta come to the yuppies’ apartment is covered in that style, because I’m dealing with Sam’s big monologue and I’ve got all these guys all over the room. We’re popping all around.

SMITH: Were you concerned about what unified Pulp Fiction as you wrote it?
TARANTINO: In a way yes, in a way no. The most organic stuff when you’re writing something like this, taking all these separate pieces and trying to make one big piece out of it, the best, richest stuff you find as you’re doing it, you know? I had a lot of intellectual ideas, like wouldn’t it be great if this character bumped into that character. A lot of it was kind of cool, but if it just worked in a cool, fun, intellectual way, ultimately I ended up not using it. It had to work emotionally.

As opposed to Dogs, which is a complete ensemble piece, [Pulp Fiction] works in a series of couples—everybody’s a couple all the fucking way through. It starts off with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, then it goes to Sam Jackson and John Travolta, then John Travolta and Uma Thurman , then it goes to Bruce Willis and the cab driver, then it’s Bruce and Maria de Medeiros and then for a moment after he leaves her he’s the only character in the movie who’s viewed completely alone. Then he makes a bond with this other character and they become a team. It’s only when they become a team that they can do anything. Circumstances make them a couple.

SMITH: I interpreted “Three stories . . . about one story” as being a comment on genre: that these three stories are all ultimately about the genre invoked by the title, Pulp Fiction.
TARANTINO: The story of a genre. The three stories in Pulp Fiction are more or less the oldest stories you’ve ever seen: The guy going out with the boss’s wife and he’s not supposed to touch her—that’s in The Cotton Club, Revenge. The middle story, the boxer who’s supposed to throw the fight and doesn’t—that’s about the oldest chestnut there is. The third story is more or less the opening three minutes of Action Jackson, Commando, every other Joel Silve movie—the hitmen show up and blow somebody away. Then they cut to “Warner Bros. Presents” and you have the credit sequence, and then they cut to the hero 300 miles away. But here the killers come in, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM—but we don’t cut away, we stay with them the whole rest of the morning and see what happens to them after that. The whole idea is to have these old chestnuts and go to the moon with them.

SMITH: On the one hand you’re making films in which you want the audience emotionally involved, as if it’s “real.” On the other you’re commenting on movies and genre, distancing the viewer from the fiction by breaking the illusion. On one level your movies are fictions, but on another level they’re movie criticism, like Godard’s films.
TARANTINO: One hundred percent.

SMITH: Does your movie consciousness prevent you from doing a movie
TARANTINO:—straight.

SMITH: Right.
TARANTINO: Your way of describing it makes what I’m doing sound so incredibly impressive. That’s one aspect of Godard that I found very liberating—movies commenting on themselves, movies and movie history. To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms. There were always movie buffs who understood film and film convention, but now, with the advent of video, almost everybody has become a film expert even though they don’t know it. My mom very rarely went to movies. However, now that there’s video she sees everything that comes out—I mean everything—but on video, six months after the fact. What I feel about the audience—particularly after the Eighties where films got so ritualized, you started seeing the same movie over and over again—intellectually the audience doesn’t know that they know as much as they do. In the first ten minutes of nine out of ten movies—and this applies to a whole lot of the independent films that are released, not the ones that can’t find a release—the movie tells you what kind of movie it’s gonna be. It tells you everything that you basically need to know. And after that, when the movie’s getting ready to make a left turn, the audience starts leaning to the left; when it’s getting ready to make a right turn, the audience moves to the right; when it’s supposed to suck ’em in, they move up close… you just know what’s gonna happen. You don’t know you know, but you know.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of fun in playing against that, fucking up the breadcrumb trail that we don’t even know we’re following, using an audience’s own subconscious preconceptions against them so they actually have a viewing experience, they’re actually involved in the movie. Yeah, I’m interested in doing that just as a storyteller. But the heartbeat of the movie has to be a human heartbeat. Now, if you were to walk out of the theater after the first hour of Pulp Fiction, you really haven’t experienced the movie, because the movie you see an hour later is a much different movie. And the last twenty minutes is much different than that. That’s much harder to do than when you’re dealing the a movie about a ticking bomb like Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction is much more of a tapestry.

Again, a lot of things that seem unusual for films—for instance, the Reservoir Dogs characters’ offhanded brutality, their commitment to their coldbloodedness—are not unusual in a novel in the crime genre. The characters have a commitment to their own identity, as opposed to action movies or big Hollywood movies where every decision is very committee-ized and the whole fear is that at some point the character might not be likable. But people find John Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction not only likable but very charming— considering the fact that he’s first presented as a hitman and that’s never taken back. He is what he is, he is shown plying his trade but then you get to know him above and beyond that. The reverse of never breaking that hitman mode in Hollywood movies is, Wow, he can’t fucking do that, he can’t kill the villain with his bare hands, why don’t we have him punch him and have the villain fall on something—so then he killed him but he didn’t really mean to so he can go back to his family and everything is cool, we can still feel good about liking him. That kind of bullshit I can’t abide. But you have to be engaged in the character in a human way or else it becomes an intellectual tennis game.

TARANTINO: To me, 90 percent of the problem with movies nowadays lies in the script. Storytelling has become a lost art. There is no storytelling, there’s just situations. Very rarely are you told a story. A story isn’t “Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer goes to New York to capture a Canuck bad guy.” Or, “White cop and black cop looking for a killer but this time they’re looking in Tijuana.” Those are situations. They can be fun. I just saw Speed the other day, a totally fun movie, had a blast. The last twenty minutes gets kind of cheesy, but up until then it was totally engaging. Situation filmmaking at its best, because they really went with it. Speed works. Most of them don’t work. The only thing is, I used to ride a bus for a year and I know that people aren’t as gabby on a bus as they’re portrayed. They were kind of doing an Airport thing. But on a bus you’re getting to work and people do not talk.

SMITH: Do you think Pulp Fiction represents the start of a partial retreat from genre?
TARANTINO: The entire time I was writing Pulp Fiction I was thinking, This will be my Get-it-Out-of-Your-System movie. This will be the movie where I say goodbye to the gangster genre for a while, because I don’t want to be the next Don Siegel—not that I’m as good. I don’t want to just be the gun guy. There’s other genres that I’d like to do: comedies, Westerns, war films.