Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, the crime film Pulp Fiction officially premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 1994, before opening in US theaters on October 14, 1994.
The film tells different stories of crime in Los Angeles, featuring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman. The title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-twentieth century.
Tarantino and his friend Roger Avary started with a short film idea, but they soon realized no one would fund a short.
The two took their inspiration from Mario Bava’s 1963 Italian horror film Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura).
“I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do, but filmmakers don’t: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story…I’m using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry,” Tarantino said.
To build the story, Tarantino used a non-linear structure to keep the audience paying attention to the changes and shifting details.
Costing nearly $8.5 million to make, the film spent five of its budget on actors’ salaries, earned more than $100 million at the box office, and received seven nominations at the 67th Academy Awards. Tarantino and Roger Avary shared the Oscar for Best Screenplay.
“Quentin sets an atmosphere where you are free to create your role without inhibitions, and he gives you lots of opportunities to explore. It’s a very calm and nurturing arena and if something needs to be directed in another way, he will gently guide you there. Mostly, he instills confidence,” Travolta said.
On the film’s 30th anniversary, in October 2024, Travolta talked about his experience when he watched the film for the very first time during the 1994 Cannes Film Festival; he said, “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.”
In recent years, Tarantino has been focusing more on theater, writing and directing his stage play The Popinjay Cavalier. While he scrapped his originally planned tenth movie, The Movie Critic, he wrote the screenplay for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, which David Fincher is directing, and continues to manage his two vintage 35mm-only cinemas in Los Angeles: the New Beverly Cinema and the Vista Theatre
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