'Do you think you’re going to give this part to somebody else?'
February 19, 2013 5:44 AM   Subscribe

The Making of 'Pulp Fiction' as told by Quentin Tarantino and the cast. Plus ephemera, a QT death chart, and Marvin.
posted by xowie (50 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Marvin" is the voice of Hermes Conrad in Futurama.
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 6:00 AM on February 19, 2013 [4 favorites]


I am reminded of the old classic, Dr. Seuss Does Pulp Fiction:


I would not eat Royale with Cheese,
So do not even ask me, please.
I won't eat fries with mayonnaise,
I would not touch them anyways.
I would not drink five-dollar shake,
'Cause it gives me tummy-ache.
If I snort some uncut smack,
Blood and mucous I will yak.
"Why don't you eat pork?" you whine,
It's just 'cause I don't dig on swine.
Would you could you with a shrimp?
Would you could you with the Gimp?
I would not do so, but instead,
I think I'll blow off Marvin's head.

posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:07 AM on February 19, 2013 [8 favorites]


[Tarantino] told another friend, Eric Stoltz, "There are two parts you can do, and they both wear bathrobes."

^^LOLZ
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 6:24 AM on February 19, 2013


And what I was told at the time was, they were building this head that exploded—it’s like, “We’re never gonna use it.” Quentin said, “I don’t want to use—I don’t want to see your head explode. But we need something for the ratings people. We need something to give them.” So he shot this scene, always intending to cut it out.

Is this standard practice? If so, want to know what other over-the-edge things people have filmed just to give the censors something inessential to cut.
posted by pracowity at 6:39 AM on February 19, 2013


"Marvin" is the voice of Hermes Conrad in Futurama.

mind.blown - just like when I discovered that Gus Fring was Buggin' Out
posted by porn in the woods at 6:43 AM on February 19, 2013 [5 favorites]


Is it just me or is that Vanity Fair article *very* well-written? Or maybe it's just *good* and hanging out on the Internet has drastically lowered my expectations? But man, the prose, the story arc, that last punchy line – it's almost as exciting as an actual Tarantino film despite being about high-falootin' Hollywood shenanigans!
posted by Mooseli at 6:46 AM on February 19, 2013


The duo faced a similar conflict with their previous film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, in 1999.

About that - my favorite Letters Of Note entry ever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:53 AM on February 19, 2013 [5 favorites]


How long has Vanity Fair been doing these oral histories? Every one I've read – the one on Freaks & Geeks, the Michael Bay one, maybe one or two others – has simply been fantastic.
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:55 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


the ridiculously graphic sex scene in Team America: World Police was one of these instances

But just puppets. I was hoping to hear something about over-the-top sex scenes involving real actors.
posted by pracowity at 7:23 AM on February 19, 2013


I loved reading about Samual Jackson's raging fast food moment that sealed him the deal.
posted by Leezie at 7:35 AM on February 19, 2013 [2 favorites]


I think I've heard of early SNL doing this - creating things just for the NBC censors to cut so that they'd leave the real material alone.
posted by thelonius at 7:36 AM on February 19, 2013


Is this standard practice? If so, want to know what other over-the-edge things people have filmed just to give the censors something inessential to cut.

Not just the movies, I was always taught that when submitting something like a report/speech/poster to a boss/client who "likes to feel involved" to always include something obviously superflicious to make them feel they were equal partners in "making the masterpiece".
posted by saucysault at 7:41 AM on February 19, 2013 [4 favorites]


“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.”

That makes total sense to me. That last scene in the diner is such a tour de force of acting -- you never doubt for a second once Jules grabs the gun that he has utter control of the room, and everything about what he's doing is maintaining the tension of that scene perfectly, and oh my god it's just such a joy to watch. I'm pretty ambivalent about QT in general, but everything he's done is worth it for the existence of Pulp Fiction.
posted by invitapriore at 7:45 AM on February 19, 2013 [3 favorites]


If I were making movies these days it would be a constant reproach to me that the genius of the "long 1990s" (fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11) has had so mediocre a sequel in movies made since then. It's made up for to some extent by the way that long-form television picked up the sensibilities of 90s features and made a whole new and undeniably wonderful thing about them -- but it's still a yawning vacancy.

One of the best things about 90s movies was that it raised everyone's game. Forrest Gump, the late-in-the-piece adversary for the Best Picture Oscar, is a great example. It is a hundred times better than what aspires to fill its market space today. Maybe it's the case that the 2013 version wouldn't even bother trying to appeal to any audience with taste because people with taste simply have too many other things to watch and do, but that's still sad.
posted by MattD at 7:57 AM on February 19, 2013


If you're saying that no good movies came out in the last decade, or even in the last year, well, you musta been looking at different movies than I've been looking at.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:03 AM on February 19, 2013


Yeah, MattD, I'm with you. During the early-mid nineties, I used to really get excited about Hollywood movies. Then my excitement faded away. I remember the first time I got really amped about movies again was in 2007, when both There Will Be Blood AND No Country for Old Men came out, and thinking "wow, this was a really good year for Hollywood."
posted by nushustu at 8:04 AM on February 19, 2013


“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.”

I would love to know what Tarantino and Thurman sound like when they're discussing the difference between male and female rape.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:10 AM on February 19, 2013


Forrest Gump, the late-in-the-piece adversary for the Best Picture Oscar, is a great example. It is a hundred times better than what aspires to fill its market space today.

What? Gump is your example of quality 90s cinema?
posted by dobbs at 8:20 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


No, dobbs, I think the point is that Gump is being put forth as an example of quality 2010's cinema.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:35 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


My point is that Gump -- presented as the mass-market antithesis of Pulp Fiction's indie iconoclasym -- is a far better movie than the movies which are designed to fulfill the same mass-market middle-brow space in 2013.

I have two, somewhat mutually inconsistent, hypotheses for this. First is that filmmakers just don't have to look over their shoulders at the kind of quality that was happening in the 1990s. The second (what I described as "sad") is that with vastly more channels (literal and figurative) for obtaining and consuming creative content, there just isn't a market space for a Forrest Gump any more, and thus no need for the incremental quality. In other words, it was entirely plausible that a reasonably large segment of the Pulp Fiction audience would also see Forrest Gump in the theatrical release, or when the VHS hit Blockbuster, and that's just not plausible today.
posted by MattD at 8:42 AM on February 19, 2013


Pulp Fiction is one of my all time favourite movies, and this article was awesome! Thanks for sharing!
posted by Vindaloo at 8:57 AM on February 19, 2013


You really think Forrest Gump is is that many miles above Argo and Silver Linings Playbook?

I am really asking. I have a deep rooted, irrational hatred of Forrest Gump.
posted by DigDoug at 8:59 AM on February 19, 2013 [5 favorites]


"superflicious" is my new favorite word.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:23 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


Great article, great movie!
posted by ReeMonster at 9:27 AM on February 19, 2013


That's interesting about using the slowest Kodak film available. I'd always wondered why Pulp looked a little... different.
posted by starman at 9:49 AM on February 19, 2013


A production assistant Quentin sent to south L.A. to buy an Afro wig had no idea what that was

Kids these days...
posted by yiftach at 9:50 AM on February 19, 2013


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.”

I can think of examples of the "refusing to throw the fight" trope, and the two-man hit squad trope, but I can't think of a single movie with "mobster takes the boss' wife to dinner" as a plot point. Does anyone else know of any examples?
posted by mediated self at 10:36 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


You really think Forrest Gump is is that many miles above Argo and Silver Linings Playbook?

No - the claim is that Forest Gump is better than the mass-market stuff rather than the "Serious Picture" niche. So the claim isn't that Forrest Gump is better than Argo, rather the claim is that Forrest Gump is better than Identity Thief or Safe Haven.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:45 AM on February 19, 2013


Pulp Fiction was just so much fun, it jumped off the screen, it just popped, grabbed you by your eyes and your ears from the start and you were off and running. And it was runniing, too, not walking, it ran for hours but held you right there "Where is this guy going to take us next?". Wildly creative, inventive, so much fun, such good writing, such good music. So many great stars and, as importantly or maybe more importantly, all of them wanted so badly to be there, everyone gave him all they had.

Tarantino is so audacious -- and I'm not talking just about what he did with his characters, though he was audacious in that, too -- he was so large, he believes in himself so much, he had not just the talent to write it and direct it but also to get people to put millions of dollars into him without giving them much say in what he was doing with it, he had a vision and didn't let anyone muck it up. Very few people even have the snap to get to dream up dreams like he did, much less dream them up and then bring them to fruition.

~~~~

Forest Gump is the biggest piece of shit I have ever seen. Complete garbage. Perfectly American, 100% Hollywood, point of view of the world through the eyes of a braindead, smiling sack of shit, unable to think with clarity at all, an emotional idiot cut off from any higher levels of thought and smiling about it, and happy about it, and chuckling about it, h-yuk h-yuk h-yuk, chocolates. Perfect. O say can you see...
posted by dancestoblue at 11:00 AM on February 19, 2013 [9 favorites]


I worked in a movie theater in 1994. There was some buzz and hype before the movie was released, so for the opening weekend my manager put it in two separate, bigger "houses" (our jargon for individual theater). Opening weekend came and...crickets. Very few people came to see it. I think one house was half-full for one show, and that was as busy as opening weekend got.

So the following week the manager put it in just one house, and a somewhat smaller one at that. Movies would typically come in, have a huge first weekend, then taper off after the first month. By the end of the second month, if its run lasted that long, it was usually banished to one of those smaller houses. A big big hit would last about three months.

Pulp Fiction lasted six months at that theater. (The only other movie that lasted that long (in 1994 anyway) was Forrest Gump.) After the disastrous first weekend, the buzz got around and people started reading reviews and within a few weeks it was sold out most shows.

And yeah, I could see movies for free, so I lost count how many times I saw Pulp Fiction.
posted by zardoz at 11:19 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


it jumped off the screen, it just popped, grabbed you by your eyes and your ears from the start and you were off and running

This is how I remember it on first viewing too -- this powerful sense from the crackling opening scene and then the soundtrack kicking in and that great throwback lettering on the title that this was a more vivid movie, that there was almost physically more to it than the standard Hollywood flick.

Which is why this was the most surprising detail for me in the VF piece:
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.”
Is this maybe why the movie felt like it had more texture to it than the norm? Would slow film and extra lighting do that?
posted by gompa at 11:45 AM on February 19, 2013


This is how I remember it on first viewing too -- this powerful sense from the crackling opening scene and then the soundtrack kicking in and that great throwback lettering on the title that this was a more vivid movie, that there was almost physically more to it than the standard Hollywood flick.

*snerk* You've reminded me - my roommate dragged me out to see it with him and a friend when it came out, and we all loved it - so much so that lines from the film became conversational shorthand in my apartment.

We didn't realize just how much the film had invaded our vocabulary until a mutual friend crashed on our couch for a couple weeks; after about three days of having to stop and explain to our friend what "Pretty fucking trippy" or "royale with cheese" was all about, we finally brought our couchsurfer friend to see it solely because then he'd finally be caught up to what the hell we were talking about.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:52 AM on February 19, 2013


Like zardoz, I was working in a movie theater when Pulp Fiction came out - we didn't get it on its initial run, but it was re-released for the Oscars a few months later and ran for months after that. I think I saw it all the way through at least 5 times, and saw the rest in countless 5-10 minute chunks during spot checks and breaks.

Articles about the film go on at such length about how groundbreaking/ revolutionary/ etc the film was that I sometimes get Pulp Fiction fatigue, but then I'll watch the movie again from start to finish and remember that yes, it really was something special that was pretty much perfect for its time and place.
posted by usonian at 12:08 PM on February 19, 2013


I didn't work at a theater when Pulp Fiction came out, but I worked at a video store when it came out on video. We ordered the most copies of Pulp Fiction that we had ever ordered of any movie (I think it was 81 copies (why 81? Uh, so I could remember it years later, because 81 is 9 x 9? No idea, really)) and they were still completely rented out for weeks and weeks and weeks. It was great to have a movie that was so damn good be so damn popular - usually it was exactly the opposite and the shittier the movie was the more popular it was. Forrest Gump indeed.

That POS was also hugely popular at our store (and everywhere) but man I hated it, and I hated it even more for being so so so popular while being so so SO mediocre, in the way that only 23 year old art students can hate commercial films. We had various specials at our store, one of which was during the month of November each staff member was to declare one movie a turkey, and stick a turkey sticker on it, and that movie got discount rentals for $1. I proudly stuck turkey stickers all over Forrest Gump.

I've softened my Gump position, now. I'm not going to go rent it or anything, but I can see some good qualities in it, a few really good performances, some well done effects. I wouldn't coat it in turkey stickers now. But Pulp Fiction was and is clearly the better film and really really should have won Best Picture.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:28 PM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


Thurman says that, of all the scenes she was nervous about, it was dancing with John Travolta that intimidated her the most, ...

I said, ‘I’ll teach Uma the steps, and when you want to see a different step, call it out.’ ...


Just read this, took me right into that dance scene -- what a great dancer Travolta is, and Thurman too, just yet another great scene in that movie. It would be so great to be able to dance like that, that freedom and confidence and grace, sexuality except with clothes on.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:46 PM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


All the Pulp Fiction love in here is a lovely thing. I went to see it in the theater across the street from where I worked 8 times. I think that was over about 6 weeks. The only other non-pixar movie I've done that with is The Matrix a few years later. I'd *love* for a movie to grab me like that again.

Hope I'm not too jaded to let it happen.

PS: Regarding '94 and movies Box Office Mojo 1994 Domestic Grosses I think you're right... the mid 90s top 10 sure feels like better movies than the last few years'. But that could just be the GET OFF MY GRASS talking.
posted by DigDoug at 12:46 PM on February 19, 2013


See, I'd just had a baby and I'd never done that before and we did polyamory the "wrong" way and suddenly my baby's daddy wasn't the guy I was married to but we were going to try it out anyway because the husband didn't "do" children and the boyfriend who was now the babydaddy wanted us to live with him and I had to have a place to go that was safe where I could nurse and sleep and watch the baby grow (too fast).

I hadn't seen Pulp Fiction since high school. He had it on VHS and he hooked the VCR up one night because it was 1am and the baby wasn't going back to sleep and he was trying to get used to us in his space and I said "I haven't seen Pulp Fiction since high school" and we'd already watched all of Boardwalk Empire and all the Star Wars movies plus two LOTR marathons in two weeks.

When the opening scene concluded and the drums hit I looked down and told the baby "That's Dick Dale and the Del-Tones but the song is an old bellydancing song, Mama used to dance to it in Greece. I'll tell you more about Greece some day, and more about surf music." You have to give kids a sense of their own heritage.

The babydaddy did a lot of stuff I didn't like, and I wasn't used to it. He used the word "retarded" like it was 1991 and we were in middle school. He barely stopped short of flapping his hand against his chest. "Gay" was an adjective, liberally applied to anything I considered cultured. When Fabienne said "Don't talk to me in that Mongoloid voice!" I laughed and hiccuped and he smirked in my direction and I thought maybe we'd just understood each other accidentally. It's hard trying to make a relationship and date after you've already had a baby together. It's all backwards and the stakes are too high to begin with and you find yourself having to come to terms with things you didn't even know people did anymore, like use the word "retarded" for stuff they think is stupid, or yell at babies for crying, as if they could help it.

When Mrs. Wallace danced with Vincent the baby seemed to like the music and at the end of the scene the boyfriend said "He didn't touch her once. That's what's so brilliant about that" and I didn't say anything and kind of held my breath because omg, we are talking about movies like regular people on a date. And he DIDN'T touch her once, but it's still so sexy! And tense!

Fabienne lost the watch and we'd just had an argument so similar the day before that I might have let my jaw drop a little and I'm sure it wasn't pretty, but me and pretty were a little bit at odds already what with the baby and the nursing and the sudden divorce and cross country move. He said "She reminds me of you, she's got that big-eyed European thing going on" and I remembered she was Anais Nin then Bruce Willis breaks something onscreen and at least this time when the babydaddy looks at me he is a little embarrassed at how cliche we are, that we live things out twenty years after they played in a cinema somewhere. I think his embarrassment is a hopeful sign. At least he knows it's wrong, right? All that anger? And over a gift, besides.

I fell asleep before the movie ended and he covered me with a blanket and the next day something lit his fuse and I parroted a line of Fabienne's and he laughed and it was so embarrassing, how easy it was to communicate with movie lines instead of just saying what you think or feel and being unafraid of the truth of it.
posted by annathea at 1:57 PM on February 19, 2013 [16 favorites]


But just puppets. I was hoping to hear something about over-the-top sex scenes involving real actors.

There's a scene in Casino where Joe Pesci's character interrogates a guy. Dude's recalcitrant, so Pesci beats him up and puts his head in a vise. As the interrogee resists, Pesci turns the vise tighter and tighter. The story goes that Scorsese put that scene in there (it's not all that plot-relevant) to eventually take it out to appease the MPAA.
posted by aureliobuendia at 1:57 PM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time this year on TV, and it still holds up even after the parodies and pastiches. It's still getting referenced- Lollipop Chainsaw, a game that came out last year, has a boss named Zed just so killing him gets you a 'Zed's Dead' Achievement.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 2:15 PM on February 19, 2013


gompa: "Which is why this was the most surprising detail for me in the VF piece:

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.”

Is this maybe why the movie felt like it had more texture to it than the norm? Would slow film and extra lighting do that?
"

It depends on what you mean by "texture". Basically, by using slower film and more light (which is necessitated by slower film to get the same exposure), you get, essentially, less grain. The comment about making it look like it cost 25 million probably refers to making it look more slick Hollywood and less indie, because indie productions have notoriously small budgets for lighting package rental, and thus tend to shoot on faster film and get more grain.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:33 PM on February 19, 2013 [3 favorites]


The one glaring flaw in the masterpiece that is Pulp Fiction is Tarantino's awful cameo appearance.
posted by moorooka at 8:18 PM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


moorooka: "The one glaring flaw in the masterpiece that is Pulp Fiction is Tarantino's awful cameo appearance"

That's a common flaw in most of his movies. The one in Django Unchained could have been ok, but he insisted on doing a god-awful Australian accent.

Then again, that may be my only complaint about that movie, since it's basically flawless.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:26 PM on February 19, 2013


I didn't think the Australian accent in Django was that bad, and I've been in Australia for 10 years. It was pretty interesting how the Australian wasn't the most racist character in the movie though.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 9:42 PM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


Also: Daniel Day-Lewis as Vincent Vega breaks my brain in half.
posted by usonian at 6:14 AM on February 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I rewatched it after reading this article yesterday. Man oh man does Sam Jackson kill it in that last scene.
posted by duvatney at 9:08 AM on February 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I can't think of a single movie with "mobster takes the boss' wife to dinner" as a plot point. Does anyone else know of any examples?

I think that it's more the thing of "underling has an affair with mob boss' wife", and although I can't think of a lot of examples, there's Jack Napier (aka the Joker) in Burton's first Batman flick, as well as the protagonist in Stephen King's short story "The Ledge", who's a tennis pro. (King is a serious pulp fiction fan, and "The Ledge" is totally a pulp fiction story.) It's really a subtype of the Forbidden Fruit trope.

Also, WRT alternative casting: I would have preferred to see Steve Buscemi as Jimmy--he was really wasted as the waiter in the diner--and, and this is going to sound a little crazy, but think about it: Kathy Bates as the Wolf. Nothing against Harvey Keitel, by any means, but just imagine these guys thinking of this legendary character that they've never actually met, and Jimmy opens the door, and it's this cheerful, matronly middle-aged woman. And, a few minutes later, she's got them eating out of her hand. Just thinking about Bates purring, "Pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fuckin' car" gives me chills.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:42 PM on February 20, 2013 [1 favorite]




Couple of other anecdotes about Pulp Fiction that I didn't see mentioned in the articles.

There was a bit of a dust-up during production when Harvey Keitel insisted on having a $1,200 DuPont cigarette lighter for The Wolf to use, but the producers refused, which led to some ruffled feathers at the time, particularly given Tarantino's indebtedness to Keitel.

Also, the adrenaline injection scene is taken almost word-for-word from Scorcese's American Boy, in a story told by Steven Prince.
posted by ShutterBun at 6:10 PM on February 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


So much of Tarantino's comedy is based on word-play, and so little of it is situational, that it made for a really surreal movie experience: I saw it here in Japan, with a few other exchange students, in a packed theater on opening night (remember, movies come out later here, so by opening night everyone knew that this was a huge hit in America).

At so many points during that movie you could hear laughter coming from exactly two places in the movie theater: my group of exchange students, and two other foreigners up near the front. For the non-English speakers looking at the visuals and reading the subtitles, it was apparently a very bleak movie.
posted by Bugbread at 9:19 PM on February 26, 2013 [2 favorites]


I would imagine the phrase "I'm a mushroom-cloud layin' motherfucker, motherfucker!" would be a difficult sell in Japan.

With regard to the late theatrical release, Japan at least ended up getting a MUCH sooner laserdisc release than the U.S., owing to the film's extended run here due to the "Oscar bump." I was able to get an import laserdisc while the film was still in theaters here, which was cool.
posted by ShutterBun at 9:07 PM on February 28, 2013


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