‘Pulp Fiction’ Turns 30: How Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece Saved Careers, Conquered Film Festivals and Changed Cinema Forever
Celebrating its 30th anniversary on Oct. 14, “Pulp Fiction” has left a massive footprint on moviemaking.
Originally conceived as an anthology by writer-director Quentin Tarantino and his longtime friend, collaborator and Video Archives coworker Roger Avary, the film evolved into a funny, violent, endlessly inventive, non-linear odyssey. In addition to reviving the career of John Travolta, minting a star in Samuel L. Jackson and spawning a still-thriving cottage industry of knockoffs and imitation films, “Pulp” earned the 1994 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, seven Academy Award nominations and one win (for Tarantino and Avary’s screenplay), while its commercial success ($213 million off of an $8.5 million budget) forever changed the economics of independent cinema.
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To commemorate the legacy and impact of “Pulp Fiction,” Variety spoke with more than 20 members of the film’s cast and crew to solicit their experiences and recollections. Armed with more than 100 pages of interviews, we’ve elected to break down this retrospective into two sections. This article covers the film’s conception and its release, and another will delve into the nuts and bolts of the production itself.
The origins of “Pulp Fiction” began in the late 1980s while Tarantino and Avary were working together at southern California video store mainstay Video Archives.
Roger Avary, cowriter, story: The original idea for “Pulp Fiction” was, we’re going to make three short films with three different filmmakers. I’m going to make one, Quentin’s going to make one and we hit a pal, Adam Rifkin, who was going to make one. I wrote a script called “Pandemonium Reigns,” and along the way, my little short film expanded into a feature-length script. “Reservoir Dogs” expanded into a feature-length script. Adam just never wrote his, and “Pulp Fiction” for a while was something that wasn’t going to happen.
Danny DeVito, executive producer: Stacey Sher knew Quentin, and she set up a meeting for us. After about six minutes of talking with Quentin, I said, “I want to make a deal right now.” There was a little Quentin pause, and he said yes. And I made a deal with him. I hadn’t seen “Reservoir Dogs” yet because it was still being made.
Avary: And then Quentin does “Reservoir Dogs” and he’s getting all sorts of offers to do really cool studio projects. But he basically came back and called me one day and said, “I keep thinking about ‘Pulp Fiction,’ and I think I want to make it as one movie and direct it all myself.” So we took my script [to “Pandemonium Reigns”] and we collapsed it back down, and then we went to Amsterdam and we took all the scenes that we’d ever written that hadn’t been already put into movies. And out came eventually “Pulp Fiction.”
Lawrence Bender, producer: After “Reservoir Dogs,” I flew to Amsterdam to meet him there, and he had this little Walkman and he was listening to Dick Dale and “Misirlou,” and he was listening to all this surf music as he’s writing “Pulp Fiction.” Of course, “Misirlou” ends up in the credit sequence.
DeVito: I spoke to him during that year, checking in, just “How’s everything? Is it coming along?” And then, there was a doorbell ring, and there was a package, a manila envelope with 155 pages in it. I swear to God, I always like to think it was still warm. And the top page read, “Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, final draft.” I tucked myself into a sofa with a cup of tea and I laughed my ass off. I loved it from the very beginning to the very end. The big question was that it was 155 pages. I had this woman I worked with, Wilma, who was my script supervisor, and she used to time things for me. You usually go a page a minute, and the final running time of the movie was 154 minutes.
Michael Shamberg, executive producer: Only Harvey [Weinstein] bid on it. Harvey thought he was in a bidding war, but he wasn’t. To this day, if I see Bob Shaye, he’ll tell me that he wished he’d never turned down “Pulp Fiction.” Quentin wanted to do it with Mike Medavoy because Mike had done all the great Orion films, but ironically, when it came along, Mike thought it was too violent.
Bender: We wanted the budget to be between $6 and $8 million, because that way we could maintain more control over the movie itself because it was a low enough budget. And when we made the movie, believe it or not, the budget of that movie literally was $8.5 million with contingency. And when it was all over, we returned $500,000 and it was exactly $8 million.
As part of his own development deal at TriStar Pictures, DeVito was given final cut on all of his projects. He passed that along to Tarantino and the other directors he worked with at Jersey Films.
DeVito: I went to Harvey [Weinstein], and he says to me, “Yeah, we’ll do this with Daniel Day-Lewis, who just won an Academy Award for ‘My Left Foot’.” I said, “The director wants John Travolta. I told this kid I’ve got final cut, plus cast approval.” I think he called me every name in the book, but of course, Quentin got what he wanted, and he was absolutely right, and the rest is history.
John Travolta (“Vincent Vega”): The last success [I’d experienced] before “Pulp Fiction” was the “Look Who’s Talking” films, so getting the “Pulp” offer was certainly a next-level, upper echelon opportunity more along the lines of the Oscar nomination-type performance of “Saturday Night Fever” and “Blow Out” integrity. I was one of his favorite actors growing up on “Welcome Back Kotter,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Grease” and “Blow Out,” and he wanted to work with me. I think it helped his being a big Pauline Kael fan, and my being one of her favorite actors, so he raised the bar for me and gave me a second chance at a high-end career, one that he always wanted me to have.
Bender: When Sam came in, he was great. But then someone else came in and blew us away, and I had to call Sam’s agent and said, “we might have to go with that other person.” And she said, “No, no, no, you can’t do that. Sam will come back.” I didn’t want to make Sam come in and audition again. But it turned out that Sam thought he was just coming in to read. He didn’t think he was actually auditioning. So he came back in and just blew the doors off.
Bender: Harvey Keitel was the linchpin getting “Reservoir Dogs” made. And on “Pulp Fiction,” he knew Bruce Willis. So we went up to see him at his house in Malibu. [Bruce] could recite basically the entire movie of “Reservoir Dogs.” He loved that movie. It was a “you had me at hello” kind of thing. And he and Quentin took a walk on the beach, and they came back and Bruce was doing the movie.
Tim Roth (“Pumpkin”): The character that he was writing for me was what Bruce Willis ended up playing. But there was a fun thing that happened that I think brought about the Pumpkin and Honey Bunny situation, which was I got to know Amanda Plummer a little bit. And she had the premiere of “The Fisher King” coming up, and I suggested that I would be her date. We went to the premiere, and there was Terry Gilliam and Quentin. I got to talking with Quentin and I remember saying to him, “I want to be in a film with Amanda, but she has to have a gun in her hand because the idea of Amanda Plummer having a gun in her head is truly terrifying.” And sure enough, he wrote it.
Avary characterized their collaborations in those years as one in which “everybody was doing everything.” Though his work on “Pandemonium Reigns” had provided a loose structure for the film’s “The Gold Watch” sequence, Avary says there were no conflicts over how credit was assigned on the final script.
Avary: Quentin told me what he wanted to do, and we did it. Neither of us were in the Writers Guild at that time.
Karyn Rachtman, music supervisor: I got more credit for working on those movies then I deserve, to an extent. But the hardest thing about Quentin was I remember going to his apartment because he knew everything he wanted, but he spelled everything wrong. So my job was, “Let me please come over and go through your record collection and get the proper spelling, because there is no song called this.” And I remember going through and him showing me the Urge Overkill on vinyl. He knew what he wanted.
Bender: The first major screening of the movie was at the New York Film Festival. It’s a massive theater and we’re in the box seats, and right when Uma gets stabbed with a needle, you see some rustling down below. Someone screams, “Is there a doctor in the house?” I jump out of my seat and run downstairs, and the manager of the theater runs up to me, “What do I do?” I say, “Turn the lights on.” So the movie shuts down, and the lights come on. And the guy, he had a sugar shock or something, and that scene shocked him into this kind of thing where he fainted. So me and Harvey Weinstein walk over, a couple of people help him up and they give him some orange juice. Harvey gives him his limousine and he takes him home so he can be fine, and everything’s fine. But now, the biggest fear Harvey and Bob had at the time was that people were going to see this movie as too violent, and they wanted to promote this movie and make it be a big hit. So now in the upstairs lobby, they’re pacing back and forth, “What do we do? If this gets out that this guy went into shock because of the violence in the movie, that’s going to be the only thing that people hear about.” They’re freaking out. But the story did not get out, and the reviews were great. And that was the beginning of a successful launch of the movie.
For the cast and production team, seeing the final film for the first time was almost as memorable as reading Tarantino’s script.
Ving Rhames (“Marsellus Wallace”): It was at the premiere. I thought it was a hell of a movie.
Travolta: It was at the Cannes Film Festival. It exceeded my expectations because it arrived at a new level of storytelling and filmmaking and you could feel it — it was visceral. It was history in the making.
Julia Sweeney Blum (“Raquel”): This is now a source of friction between me and Quentin. Because we went to Edinburgh and they did a midnight secret screening of “Pulp Fiction” before Cannes, and that’s when I saw it. And that was the last time I saw it until I saw it at the [30th anniversary screening at the TCM Film Festival in April 2024]. And when I said that, Quentin got very upset that I had not seen it in between. And I said, “Okay, here’s my defense. One is, it is true that Steve Hibbert, my ex-husband, is in it.” Honestly, I didn’t care that he played The Gimp, but the big thing is I can’t stand to look at myself. I’ve learned to get over it, but it’s not something I willingly do. That was my reason to Quentin, and he accepted that.
Shamberg: At Cannes, I remember a standing ovation that went on forever, and my wife turned to me and said, “This movie’s great. It’s going to get Oscar nominations.”
Frank Whaley (“Brett”): When the film was released, I was out of the country working. And I got several calls from people saying it’s the greatest movie they’d ever seen. And when I got back home, I was living in New York City, and it was a week or two after the film had been released. I still hadn’t seen it. But I was being recognized on the subway, and that had never happened. I’d been working for a good five, six years in films, big films, and I never got recognized.
Griffin: When I finally saw the movie, it was beyond expectations. Because on the page, I was like, fuck, this is gory. And there was the N-word, and then he said the N-word. And like any white person, I’m looking around at the Black people here, going, “what are they doing?” So a lot of it was shocking for its time. And yet when I saw the execution just as a fan, scene after scene after scene, I was like, “he fucking did it.” I marveled at the performances, large and small. I want you to know that my three lines are the reason it won the Palme d’Or.
Rosanna Arquette (“Jody”): I was pregnant when it came out, and I remember going into it and it was so violent my mom and I had to leave. So I’d never sat and watched it as a cinema experience until 30 years later at the Chinese Theatre. It’s still this cultural phenomenon, but also I still have the issue of, enough with the N-word. For me, that’s always been an issue, and I didn’t realize how much it was an issue until I saw it this last time. It’s still great filmmaking, but there’s cringe-worthy moments, and it’s usually not just the violence. But I do love him as a filmmaker.
Avary: Everybody was telling me, “You’re going to win an Academy Award.” But I was like, “Stop saying that. You’re going to jinx it!” It made it more nerve wracking that they were saying that. And plus, we were up against really excellent movies. But when they called my name, I, in my mind, floated above my body and watched myself walk up as a detached entity. The very next day, I went from being an indie filmmaker who’s been told no by everyone to all of a sudden, everyone wants to meet with you. And that can be a head trip. I’m lucky that my wife immediately identified this psychology breakdown and had me take out the trash.
For nearly every member of the cast and crew, being a part of cinematic history was humbling and life changing.
Rhames: It was a film with a great director who I admire and felt great to be a part of.
Travolta: [I hold it in] one of the most special places, because it rekindled my career to a level that I always wanted it to be. It also matched an iconic status with “Saturday Night Fever,” which was very rare in movie history.
DeVito: I had no inkling that it was going to go on to be such a seminal, revered piece of work. I have seen the movie, I don’t know how many times. No, I had no premonition that it was going to wind up being his masterpiece, which it is. You can watch it tomorrow and get the same feelings that you had 30 years ago.
Shamberg: I have one metric for films which is, if I’m making a film — and you have to watch so many cuts of a film — will I get bored watching another cut? And I watch films in theaters or on screen and I go, “I couldn’t have have sat through another screening of this film.” But you could never not enjoy watching “Pulp Fiction.”
Avary: “Pulp Fiction” made it possible for me to raise a family. That’s just a simple fact. The success of the film made it possible for me to enjoy life and to be able to focus on the work that I was developing. And to have gotten to know the actors that I got to know from the film, Bruce and Maria and John, I just love all three of them.
Whaley: It’s definitely a career milestone for me to be involved in this film, just like everybody else who’s in it. I mean, I can only speak for myself. But when the New York Times, God willing publishes my obituary, that’ll be one of the things mentioned. I’m still lucky enough to be working after 35 years and making a living, and I would definitely attribute my involvement in “Pulp Fiction” to that.
Griffin: Two things. Number one, it’s always just weird when people are like, “Is that you in ‘Pulp Fiction’?” Because it’s so unexpected. And number two, I love that he credited me as Kathy Griffin plays Herself. At the time, he knew very much that I wanted to be famous, and so as a favor, he put Kathy Griffin as Herself instead of Woman Number Two or whatever. And I thought that was really sweet and really cute.
Christopher Walken (“Captain Koons”): I remember I was in Malta working, and I was in this hotel and they had a steam room, and I went in and there were these guys in there, and I sat down and all of a sudden one of them starts to do my speech from “Pulp Fiction.” He had it memorized, and suddenly all the guys with him started laughing and I realized that they were doing that for me. It showed me the depth of audience for that movie. That was halfway around the world and there were all these guys quoting “Pulp Fiction.”
Rachtman: I remember the Dick Dale people really thanking me because it made them lots of money.
Roth: What comes to mind when I think of it is I think of Amanda, Mandy P. I also remember Sam passing a wallet across, the Bad Motherfucker wallet — which we all got at the end. I think I have mine around here somewhere. Bad Motherfucker wallets. Sam’s good with shit like that too. He comes up with the best gifts at the end of films. But yeah, Bad Motherfucker.
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