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Podcast Episode Notes: The Rest Is Entertainment - Free Bonus Episode: 30 Years Of Pulp Fiction
Episode Summary In this special bonus episode of *The Rest Is Entertainment*, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quentin Tarantino's landmark film *Pulp Fiction*. The hosts dive deep into the film's production, its impact on independent cinema, and the pivotal decisions that shaped it, including the casting of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.
Key Highlights
Introduction
- Richard and Marina welcome listeners to a special episode, typically reserved for AAA members.
- Discuss the broader context of the film industry in 1994, with notable films like *Schindler's List*, *Four Weddings and a Funeral*, and *The Lion King* released that year.
*Pulp Fiction* and Its Cultural Impact
- *Pulp Fiction* is highlighted as a seminal work in independent cinema, reshaping the landscape and creating iconic moments that resonate even today.
- The film won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and is recognized for its innovative structure, featuring non-linear storytelling.
Background on Tarantino
- Tarantino's rise from a video store clerk to a renowned filmmaker is discussed.
- His decision to prioritize original storytelling over commercial scripts like *Men in Black* and *Speed* is emphasized.
The Making of *Pulp Fiction*
- Written during a stay in Amsterdam, the film's script was crafted in an experimental style, merging different storylines.
- The process of finding a producer is recounted, with Danny DeVito playing a crucial role in securing the film’s backing from Miramax.
Casting Decisions
- Tarantino's unique choice to cast John Travolta, who was in a career slump at the time, highlights his understanding of cinema and actor potential.
- Samuel L. Jackson's breakout role is discussed, detailing how he secured the part despite initial doubts from producers.
The Film's Release
- The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation and winning the Palme d'Or, which laid the groundwork for its commercial success.
- It grossed over $200 million worldwide, establishing a new benchmark for indie films and changing the industry landscape.
The Legacy of *Pulp Fiction*
- The discussion touches on Tarantino's subsequent career trajectory, including his celebrity status and the impact of *Pulp Fiction* on independent film production.
- The film's enduring relevance today is highlighted, with calls for new audiences to experience it.
Key Takeaways
- Cultural Significance: *Pulp Fiction* symbolized a shift in independent filmmaking, offering a uniquely bold narrative style and artistic freedom.
- Casting Innovation: Tarantino’s choices in casting, particularly Travolta and Jackson, demonstrate his eye for talent and storytelling.
- Industry Influence: The film’s success paved the way for future indie films, while also complicating the dynamics between studios and independent filmmakers.
Final Thoughts Richard and Marina conclude by encouraging listeners to revisit *Pulp Fiction*, reflecting on its influence on both cinema and culture. The episode serves not only as a celebration of a classic film but also as an insightful look at the intricacies of filmmaking and the entertainment industry.
Additional Information For more exclusive content, listeners are encouraged to sign up for *The Rest Is Entertainment Club* at [therestisentertainment.com](http://therestisentertainment.com).
Follow the Podcast
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Producers
- Neil Fearn
- Joey McCarthy
Executive Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Hello, Marina here. Welcome to a special edition of The Restless Entertainment that we're giving to you for free. this is usually only available for our triple a members and i'm here too marina oh sorry hello no listen it's absolutely okay you remember me yeah it is familiar but you're gonna have to place yourself the tall guy used to do that quiz oh yeah of course okay now yes this is a special episode which we recorded for our members celebrating quentin tarantino's classic pulp fiction and this is just a taste of the bonus episodes you can enjoy as a triple a club member we've done all sorts of nonsense.
0:36When you join, you can listen to the entire backlist. There's episodes about creating hit quiz shows, Marina's favourite books on Hollywood. And, of course, I was delighted to finally be able to do the deepest of dives on my love for Steven Seagal. And after listening, I am now happy to profess my love for Steven, certainly my interest in what's going to happen to him next. Either way, first name terms. With Steven? Yeah. Yeah, of course. me him and Kim by which I mean Kardashian not Il Jong Join the Rest is Entertainment Club at therestisentertainment.com for bonus episodes ad free listening and early access to our weekly Q &A and extras that we've just added to the membership offer We also have a brand new chat community hosted on Discord where you can natter about your favourite shows and films plus ask questions for the show Make sure you go to our newsletter each week as we're partnering with the independent bookshop Kohl's to offer AAA members a 10 % discount on any of our book recommendations.
1:35Now, if you're listening on Apple, you can now subscribe directly in the app or at therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.
1:46We are, this week, talking about a movie which is 30 years old this year. There's a number of big movies came out in 1994. Schindler's List was 94. Four Weddings and a Funeral was 94. Lion King, Mrs. Doubtfire, if you're looking for a deep dive into any of those. We are not currently doing it. But listen, at some point, we could do a deep dive into any of those. I do have Mrs. Doubtfire deep dive. It would be fascinating. Hold on, let's do that. Yeah. Do we know enough about that yet? But we are actually talking about a movie that won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. It was the second movie of a particular director, and it is Pulp Fiction.
2:20We are talking about Pulp Fiction, which came out in October 1994 and thus is 30 years old, which makes us crazily old. Very, very old. So if you are the same age as us, we'll be talking about a film you know well. If you are a great deal younger than us, this will be one of those movies. This would be a movie, like to my daughter, who was born after this movie came out. This would be like me hearing about, you know, To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest. But I actually don't, okay, I don't think it is the most influential movie of the 90s. Because I think The Matrix ends up being the most influential movie.
2:56That's interesting. I've never seen The Matrix. Have you not? No, what do you think about that? Oh, well, you haven't been red-pilled, have you? Well, exactly. I refuse to watch it. Yeah, okay. Because, should I tell you why? Because I'm a free man. Yeah. Okay? Well, I think that ends up being the most significant. But this has got a strong claim to be the next most significant for reasons that we will definitely get into. Reservoir Dogs comes out in 1992, and I saw that. And that is sort of made on a much lower budget. And we all fancied ourselves as film lovers. We knew it was coming out, and we went to see it, and it was a big sort of thing.
3:28Wasn't it? But it was the last time I really remember, like, posters for a film coming out and everyone saying, oh, I'm going to go see this thing, this completely new movie by a completely new director. There were people in it that you knew, but no one kind of massive. You know, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth are not massive. Harvey Keitel. You only knew Harvey Keitel if you were into kind of Scorsese and other things like that particularly. You know, you weren't necessarily thinking this guy's a mega movie star. But the buzz around it was absolutely huge and people loved it. And we talked on the last bonus episode with Steven Seagal about Under Siege.
3:58And when you have a huge hit, what do you do next? And that's often the most defining thing in people's careers. But in 93, we should also say True Romance, which I absolutely love, which is written by Quentin Tarantino. And by that stage, because Reservoir Dogs had been such a sort of cult thing, just the fact he'd written True Romance, that's directed by Tony Scott. But just the fact he'd written it made it a huge sort of draw. and people were already thinking, I'm going to go and see a movie this guy has written, which, by the way, is not something that happens every day. No, exactly. So that's a weird sort of blip in the Tarantino timeline because he was offered all sorts of films to direct, which we'll talk about.
4:35But in the meantime, yes, he had a screenplay and someone else said, I'm going to take this. So True Romance was made and it's sort of a Tarantino movie and it certainly has the DNA of a Tarantino movie. He doesn't hate it. Like he hates Natural Born Killers because Oliver Stone took that and he hates what he did with it. There's a brilliant book about Natural Born Killers written by one of the screenwriters just about the whole process of making it, which I really recommend. Yeah, because there's a lot of screenwriters in the end on that. There was one to start with Quentin Tarantino and then there's quite a lot by the end.
5:01So he's had this huge hit with Reservoir Dogs. Put True Romance to one side for a moment because he sells that to Tony Scott, which any of us would do if Tony Scott wants to buy your script. He has offered such a huge amount of movies. He's offered Men in Black. He's offered Speed. All of these things. And he says no to all of them, which again, this is just the absolute thing. You've had a hit. What do you do next? And he could have done Speed and he could have turned into one of those directors. He can knock out that kind of stuff. But people didn't want to make his own things. He wanted to make his own movie.
5:32He'd had an idea with Roger Avery, who was another screenwriter who Tarantino... Who he worked in the video store with originally. Worked in a video store, Video Archives. And that's famously the sort of, the legend of Tarantino. He's a video store clerk who becomes a movie maker. He's forever telling you his origin story. Yeah. Although he also worked in aerospace recruitment and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So he was, listen, he was... He edits all of that out. But he always says there's some line that I didn't go to film school, I went to films. It's a good line. Yeah. The guy can write.
5:59To be fair, he decides he wants to make Pulp Fiction. And listen, it was easier to make movies in those days, but it wasn't easy. You know, the doors were open, which are currently not open, but he was able to put his foot down and said, no, I'm not going to do these movies you want me to do. He went to Amsterdam, wrote Pulp Fiction. Him and Roger Avery had an idea of like a portmanteau film where three of them all wrote different episodes of it and then put it all together. And he sort of took that idea and smushed everything together into Pulp Fiction. It's three very different strands in Pulp Fiction.
6:28One of them was originally written by Roger Avery, one Tarantino, the other was going to be another friend of this, which came to nothing. He smushes them all together and goes, this is the thing I want to make. It's interesting because it's not in chronological order. So there's something kind of postmodern and weird about that, which you don't normally see, certainly not in a film that comes as big as hit as this one does. they're sort of interwoven tales kind of hard-boiled crime you know pulp fiction exactly that but yeah an incredibly interesting structure yeah where the beginning is not at the beginning the end is not at the end it's both somewhere in the middle and vice versa which is very very impressive and you can tell it's a guy who knows what he's doing and loves what he's doing and loves loves film he'd had a meeting with danny devito danny devito is so often the hero in hollywood stories without you ever knowing it you know you just think oh what the guy from twins Danny DeVito has made some unbelievable choices in his career almost all correct from marrying Rhea Perlman to making Pulp Fiction to some incredible Limoncello I've got some of that yeah I've had some of that does he?
7:36DeVito? yeah okay I would like anything he does it's delicious yeah and even saying yes to it's always sunny in Philadelphia I mean come on one of the most extraordinary casting choices of all time yeah he rarely puts a foot wrong so he meets um tarantino says yeah listen i'll be a producer of that he says i remember the day the script turns up for uh pulp fiction tarantino had been in amsterdam writing in old school exercise books and sends it over to uh danny devito and he gets it and it's 155 pages long which is too long for a movie a page a page a minute we normally think of in scripts uh and And he just said, look, I just knew it was unbelievable.
8:16So they shop it around to everybody. Everybody passes on it. Because it's so violent. It's so violent. And it's just that it wasn't the sort of – it had a violence that wasn't normal for the era. There's a certain type of violence that, you know, the Steven Seagal type violence that was acceptable. But this was very brash and very bold and very real. And so everybody says no, except for, so if Danny DeVito is the hero of so many Hollywood stories, the villain of so many Hollywood stories comes in, Harvey Weinstein. Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob, who have a company called Miramax. Yeah. And this is actually the first full Miramax.
8:53It ends up being the first full Miramax film. Is that right? It's the first one? Yeah, the first full thing that they have. Yeah, full one, yeah, yeah. And they make it for$8.5 million, which is not too terrible. They've had this dream, those two brothers. and obviously we know how the story ends, but they have had this dream that they're going to make incredibly commercial art movies. So it's like art has stuff, but for a multiplex audience. That's what Robert Redford, by the way, always felt could be done. You know, the whole Sundance Film Festival, all the things that, those things that were set up to kind of try and push independent films to say, hey, these stories are amazing and they can be big.
9:28They just don't get enough play or they don't get whatever. But we believe that ultimately the audience, if you put these films in front of people, audiences in a place they can see them i.e. multiplexes or wherever rather than some kind of cool little theatre in new york lots of people will want to see films like this and they did have that weird kind of commercial plus art belief that both could be together and that actors and directors would want to come and work because rather than feeling that they had to do these kind of commercial movies for the studios and then they could go off and do a project that no one really saw but was their favorite thing that they'd done in three years you didn't have to have that you didn't have to do one for me one for you one for me one for you you could do all for yourself all the time and lots of people will go and see it and tarantino is the perfect partner in crime for that because that's exactly his aesthetic as well he's he's a guy's grown up watching every type of movie ever you know monster pics blaxploitation pics just everything and he loves it and he wants to show that to people but he wants to show it he has a commercial heart so he knows every single trope of every single one of these films he knows every single storyline of every single one of these films everyone who's acted in all of these films but he has a commercial sensibility so when it gets sent through Quentin Tarantino's filter the thing that comes out is this extraordinary movie full of things where people go oh my god the imagination here is incredible and to think of that and listen he has an incredible imagination but also he's taking so much from the history of cinema which he felt hadn't been seen by other people so he's not copying it like oh it's gangsters but it's not the mob because we'd seen all that but it was different they are gangsters but they're not the gangsters that we kept seeing for the 70s and 80s and what have you.
10:59And so Tarantino has said, I'm not going to make Speed. I'm not going to make Men in Black. I'm going to make my own movie. Decision one that he got absolutely right. Decision two he gets right is teaming up with Danny DeVito because Danny DeVito's deal at that time was that he had absolute final script approval on any of his projects and he had absolute creative approval on any of his projects. That's the thing that DeVito had signed off with. Presumably that deal was worth less money than other people's deals because that's the thing that he wanted. and the clever thing that DeVito did he made it so that that clause also covered any project that he bought and got involved with so instantly Danny DeVito's clause of absolute creative control gets passed on to Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction much to Harvey Weinstein's discussed an example of what we mean by that would be Weinstein immediately says I want Daniel Day-Lewis in this, Daniel Day-Lewis has just won the Oscar for My Left Foot and you know he's huge Daniel Day-Lewis for the Travolta role?
11:58Yeah, the Travolta character. Absolutely. I mean, the haircut, I guess, is similar. But so that's what he wants. And that's how movies get made and you get the big stars. By the way, nobody wants Travolta because he is coming out of a very fallow period. Yeah. I mean, he was nowhere at this point, John Travolta. But Quentin Tarantino understands movies. He understands actors. So he's not interested in any of that. And he goes, I want to get Travolta. And I want to get Travolta because... That kind of kitsch Americana vibe of people down at Hill, down on their lark. And he had been huge and he'd done Grease and all that kind of stuff.
12:31But even Travolta said when this script came through, he said, the last hit I'd had was Look Who's Talking. Yeah. He said, you know, the thing. I'm playing the voice of a baby. Exactly that. And so he's thinking, is this me forever now? And he's thinking back to the days when he's in Saturday Night Fever and he's a proper kind of indie actor. And he has always said, I will remain grateful forever for being considered for this because it absolutely relaunched my career in a direction. After this, he's doing Get Shorty. He's doing like working with John Woo, doing Broken Arrow, Face Off. I mean, it changes everything.
13:03And again, the decision is one of those interesting things. As you say, it is sort of kitsch. It is surprising. But you watch Travolta in that movie and he's brilliant. That's the thing that Tarantino understands. He understands that I've got this guy who was undervalued but also is brilliant. So I get everything because everyone's going to go, that's a weird bit of casting. And then they're going to watch it and I'm going to have this incredible actor. so Harvey Weinstein cannot have Daniel Day-Lewis in this movie John Travolta is in the movie and that comes down essentially to Danny DeVito so they make it and as you say the budget this surprised me actually eight and a half million it was eight million I think in the end and it looks like you know I was going to say it looks like a million dollars it looks like 30 million dollars it looks big budget this movie but it's very very cheap and that's why again the creative control was easy for them to have But they keep the salaries down and they keep, you know, there's not lots of special effects.
13:55It's about the dialogue and it's about the situations and the scenarios. So in some ways it is an expense. But Bruce Willis, they need Bruce Willis because they have to have someone that is going to be quite near the front on the poster. So people think, oh, right, you know, because if you do want to, as they say, sell art as a business, people think, I know that guy. I'll go and see this film because otherwise they're not going to go and see it from seeing Samuel L. Jackson and probably not Travolta on the poster at that stage. Looking back, again, if this was not, you know, you weren't around at the time, you'd think, well, yeah, but you've got John Travolta and Samuel L.
14:27Jackson in this movie. Hard to underestimate how little of a draw that would have been at the time. Samuel L. Jackson, who now by some measures is the highest grossing movie actor in history. But at the time, this was a huge breakout role for Samuel L. Jackson. He'd been in all sorts of things and people knew him. He'd been in Die Hard 3 and he teams up with Bruce Willis in that. But this is definitely the breakout. He's obviously been in various other things, but this is the breakout. And Travolta, as you say, down on his luck. So those two as a pairing were like no one else would have put them together.
14:56So Bruce Willis is very important. And you're telling Bruce Willis like, oh, he'll be on the poster. Well, he's not on the poster because the poster in itself is so iconic, which is Uma Thurman lying on her tummy and smoking. And that itself is a sort of like, oh, I see. And it's made to look like a pulp fiction. Yeah, and Bruce Willis they got because he was best friends with Harvey Keitel, who, of course, Tarantino had worked with in Reservoir Dogs. and Keitel had taken the script. He said, look, Bruce, there's this thing. You know, I was in this movie Reservoir Dogs and Quentin has got this thing.
15:24And Bruce Willis, it turns out, was obsessed with Reservoir Dogs and could quote the whole thing and loved it. Lawrence Bender, the producer, said, we went for a walk on the beach. He said, and by the time we got back to Bruce's house, he was in the movie. And the Bruce Willis role, it had originally been written for Tim Roth, who obviously was, you know, in the Reservoir Dogs. But I think even Tim Roth understands at some point, you can't just have the same cast. You need that big marquee name and that's Bruce Willis and of course Tim Roth is in And Travolta was going to be Michael Madsen but Michael Madsen was involved in Wired Up or something like that and therefore couldn't do that role but he makes them brothers so in the Tarantino extended universe there's Vince Vega and Vic Reagher Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction is the brother of Michael Madsen's character in Reservoir Dogs By that stage they realised they had something pretty amazing and special but first what they do is they take it to Cannes Film Festival And the first screening of this thing, they don't know anything much about it.
16:19It's at 8.30 in the morning. Wow. And it is a sensation, even at 8.30. And by the way, we know, as we've said before on the podcast, they'll clap for 10 minutes if you open it back to the carousel can. But however, it gets a huge standing ovation. And it wins the Palme d 'Or, which is the most prestigious price. So by that point, they know that they've got something really, really. Everyone thinks it's extraordinary and new and fresh and amazing. Miramax think this is the one that's going to be the thing that we want our company to be about. And so they wide release it. That means they don't just put it in a couple of theatres and they kind of build it gradually.
16:53It goes in something like 1 ,100 theatres the first weekend. It is up against The Specialist, which is a terrible movie. I've seen it literally three times. It's got, which is Sylvester Sloan is an explosive expert and it's got like Eric Roberts and Sharon Stone and Rod Stryker. Anyway, it's very bad. Pulp Fiction beats The Specialist. and ends up grossing$200 million worldwide. And by the way, changes everything for indie films. It's interesting how it changes things for Tarantino. It makes him the star. And we have one person nowadays working like that, and that's Christopher Nolan, who is the biggest piece of the jigsaw.
17:31When you're buying a movie, you're thinking, I'm buying a Christopher Nolan movie. Maybe Matt Damon's going to be in it. Maybe Cillian Murphy. It doesn't really matter. Tom Holland recently signed up to Christopher Nolan's new movie. and they said well what is it he said I don't know but he just Christopher Nolan said would you be and of course I want to be and Christopher Nolan opens movies even though he's the director this is what Tarantino became but in some ways I think it opens the door to a bit of a detour decade for him it should be his imperial he does one more movie he does Jackie Brown in 1997 but he hosts SNL he does loads and loads of cameos because he still quite likes acting I remember going to see a movie called Sleep With Me in the theatres It's some kind of slacker thing.
18:11I can't remember anything about this movie, except I knew that there was a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, so I went to see the movie. Again, I can't tell you anything about it other than it's a slacker movie. And he's at an annoying house party, and he's in the kitchen. He's the guy you don't want to get stuck with in the kitchen at the house party. Explaining, and misquoting Top Gun to explain why it's a gay movie, is the role that he plays in it. Which is very Tarantino. Yeah. But the sort of egotist in him, to some extent, takes over. And he's on talk shows. people are saying, can you put your name to a chain of restaurants?
18:42And he gets seduced by the celebrity nature of it a lot. I mean funnily enough Reservoir Dogs was part funded, again this is origin story stuff so it's not really true but it's sort of true. He played an Elvis impersonator in an episode of The Golden Girls and he got, you know with residuals and stuff, he got sort of$10 ,000 or something for that and he always said, oh that really helped fund Reservoir Dogs. I think, I don't know but it sounds Listen, it sounds great. But yeah, he's always acted and he is a better director than he is an actor. But, you know, if he wants to act... But he likes all that stuff.
19:13It's a bit like when pop stars become really famous and they start going through the opening of any envelope because they're like, oh my God, I'm on the scene. I'm going to be that person. He is on the scene for definite. Well, he's a star. And that's the thing because he can open movies so he's a star in a way that, funnily enough, Christopher Nolan isn't. He's just a filmmaker. And Tarantino was a big name on campus. But even a bigger name on campus is someone like Harvey Weinstein because he calls Miramax the house that Quentin built. Right. That's a house you don't have built. No. And Tarantino says, I'm their Mickey Mouse.
19:44And he gets these great deals. But it's a calling card, but it's also a vibe. It says, we make these incredibly commercial but very, very cool pictures. You can take pay cuts to be in it. And it gives Harvey this power to say to agents, if you don't give me that client for this movie, then I'm going to pull Quentin from you and he's going to go over to one of the other agencies or whatever it is. and he uses it like that quite a lot. And it's interesting because Tarantino has talked a lot, of course, about Weinstein and, you know, he was dating Mira Sorvino and Mira Sorvino said to him, you know what, I had this encounter, a very uncomfortable encounter with Harvey Weinstein and Quentin was furious and went and confronted Harvey Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein apologised.
20:22You think, okay, that's interesting. But then exactly the same thing happened with Uma Thurman and Uma Thurman said, I've had this very uncomfortable thing with Harvey Weinstein and Tarantino again. and said, oh, I'll go and talk to Harvey. And he said, lay off Harvey. There comes a point where you've heard it twice that you might think, okay, maybe this hasn't just happened randomly to two people I'm very close to. Maybe this is a... I genuinely think he's contrite about it. I genuinely think that, you know, he says, well, of course, I should have understood it more. But yeah, listen, there's questions to answer there.
20:55Yeah, absolutely. 100%. But it's so sort of mesmerising for everyone to then suddenly watch the rise of independent film. But in a weird way, that idea that, oh, you can be involved in these commercial independent films and Harvey Weinstein will put them all together and they'll do amazing business. It created whole new sort of different ways of campaigning for awards, all sorts of things, and people felt they could do it. But then the studio started buying up all these indie distributors because they thought, well, why not? It's so much cheaper and less. One of the biggest expenses on any studio is development.
21:27And they thought, oh, we'll get these guys to do it and we'll buy it all up. and so you're thinking oh well you know this rising tide it must lift all boats but it doesn't actually it sinks quite a lot of them and very quickly the stars want the same salaries to be in these films so the budgets get much bigger and also they become unlike movies that could grow as i say in those small releases theatrical releases at start that get to more and more screens now everyone kind of has to beat the specialist on week one uh and it's sort of never happened before but now it's happening and you're only going back now to something like A24 which is with that independent spirit where films start and then they build you sort of had to go in at number one or you're only going down and so the immediate high watermark in some way I was gonna say for as with a football analogy doing a pop fiction is like doing a Leicester City yeah which is what if they can do it okay that's the new thing that we need to be able to do so pop fiction the incredibly exciting thing was a film has not done this for many many years this is great this is like a new dawn and immediately that new dawn is the new reality which is okay your indie movie now has to break like pop fiction and so as you say it should have changed everything but actually consolidated everything which is often the way and this terrible man suddenly has this immense power immense power Weinstein not Tarantino um and Tarantino's uh because I think pop fiction really holds up I watched it again in the summer yeah there are bits of it that don't there's language in it that you think come on man which has often been his issue he writes beautiful dialogue he has a laxness with it which you wouldn't get away with these days which again he's defended many times but it's you watch it you just i don't need those words you know i just don't you know i don't need it however much spike lee has had a huge uh kind of beef with him over the years about um some of the language that he uses but those first two movies reservoir dogs and pop fiction i think are and you see it in bands releasing their first couple of albums this is a guy who spent 10 years thinking about every single movie he ever wants to make you know and also knowing that other people were getting it wrong, just knowing in his heart and that if he's ever given the opportunity and the money and have his eye behind the camera, he knows what he wants to do.
23:30And Reservoir Dogs absolutely does that and wonderful heist film. But Pulp Fiction is probably the one where you just go, he is throwing everything he knows at this. He's throwing every bit of casting he understood. He's throwing every storytelling thing he knows. He's showing every single bit of filmmaking he knows at this one film and just saying, this is the film you should all have been making all of these years and I know people are going to love it. And it absolutely felt like that when you watched it and it still feels like that now, I think. And that nothing is beyond the remit of art house, as it were.
24:00Like, yeah, you can have gangsters in art house. Why not? It doesn't have to all be these small interior stories. It sort of blows everything up in an exciting way. But actually the pieces settle with lots of power accrued to Harvey Weinstein. Tarantino on this slightly celebrity trajectory that takes him, in my view, you know, Kill Bill is almost a decade away. and he does Jackie Brown, which is less successful. Perfectly acceptable. Yeah, great, but it's less successful. And he does get kind of seduced by the life. Yeah, which, by the way, fair enough. I mean, honestly, he spent 10 years thinking about it.
24:33He did it. You know, he actually did it, and most people don't. And you think, all right, take 10 years off, and then he gets back to actual movie making. Your favourite Tarantino movie? Reservoir Dogs. Reservoir Dogs. So the movie I love by Tarantino is Inglourious Bastards. I really think it's a great film from the very opening scene with Christoph to the end and this sort of revenge tragedy thing I think that's a brilliant film Hateful Eight I didn't love Django Unchained again but you know what he can do what he wants is the truth because he really did do something extraordinary, he did sort of blow up an industry he did follow his instincts he did follow the thing that he loved, he did cast people you know samuel l jackson uh in pulp fiction which one of the most iconic performances of the last 30 years uh and they weren't going to cast him because he'd come and done an audition and lawrence bender phoned his agent said oh look sorry i think we're not going to cast sam someone else did an amazing audition uh and samuel l jackson is such a small name at this point the agent said oh sorry i didn't know it was an audition he thought he was just coming to help you out and read he didn't know it was an audition uh i didn't know that so he goes i'm going to send Sam back I'm going to send Sam back to you now and tell him it's an audition and Lawrence Bender says Sam comes in and does that you know the amazing speech of just giving it everything he had and he he got that part and you know all of those decisions that they made all those correct decisions that you make and it takes an awful lot of correct decisions to make a good movie and you know his have been accrued over the years over the years and he absolutely did it at least every time one of his movies comes out you know it's going to be interesting you know you're going to have a view on it you know he's going to try something and do something different and something original.
26:16And so, you know, for me, with something like Inglourious Basterds, it really comes off and no one else could make that film. And listen, he says he's going to quit after 10 films, but, you know, Elton John quits every two years. But he's got views and he's a talker and he's, you know, I love those people in the culture who will say all sorts of different things. I mean, he's very disparaging about things like Marvel movies. I sort of love him being out there to remind people that, yes, directors can be these kind of powerhouse figures who have things to say. And don't just tell people in tights where to stand.
26:49And on that bombshell. On that bombshell. So yeah, do have a rewatch if you've not seen it for a while. It genuinely stands up. And if you've never seen it before, definitely have a look at it. But I hope this gives a bit of context to what the culture was like at the time and the environment in which that film came out and quite what a huge deal it was for Travolta and Jackson. And independent film and the industry. Yeah, exactly.
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It's been 30 years since it Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction reshaped independent cinema and burst onto the box office. How did the film come to be made? What made Tarantino fight for John Travolta? What role did Danny DeVito play?
Join Richard and Marina for a deep dive into a seminal movie that created memes before memes, posters than adorned student rooms the world over, and continues to influence future generations of film makers.
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