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.
By Mark SealPhotograph by Annie Leibovitz
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 becomePulp
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 Timescalled 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
sectioncentered 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 directReservoir 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 for Dressed 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?”
‘Ihad 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.”
‘Ascript 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 inReservoir 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 in Saturday 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 thatJohn 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 is exactly 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.