Thirty years ago, the release of Pulp Fiction saw Quentin Tarantino reach the peak of his international celebrity. A look back at the Tarantinomania of 1994:
Joining Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino became one of a vanishingly small number of filmmakers who could be described as a household name in the early 1990s. Having broken through with the blackly comic and unabashedly violent Reservoir Dogs in 1992, his fame arguably reached its peak in 1994; to borrow a term from critic Joshua Mooney, it was a time of Tarantinomania.
That year saw the release of Pulp Fiction, which soon became more than merely a popular low-budget thriller: it was a pop cultural event, with its music, snappy dialogue and hip 50s styling appearing all over the place. But 1994 was also the year of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (Tarantino wrote the original script, later reworked by Stone and two other screenwriters), and the US release of low-budget heist thriller Killing Zoe (which he co-produced for his Pulp Fiction writing partner Roger Avery).
Then there was Tarantino’s uncredited but now famous cameo in Sleep With Me, in which he threatened to steal the whole movie as a motor-mouthed party guest talking – in trademark Tarantino-esque terms – about the homoerotic subtext humming away in Tony Scott’s Top Gun. That same year, the BBC aired a 52-minute long documentary called Hollywood’s Boy Wonder, which both interviewed Tarantino and talked to other filmmakers about his meteoric rise to prominence.
Few filmmakers before or since have enjoyed Tarantino’s level of fame; his motor-mouthed speech patterns became so widely known that BBC Radio One DJ Steve Wright once did an impression of him (“I used to work in a video shop, okay…”) on his afternoon show. Other filmmakers had bigger hits than Tarantino – Spielberg, for example, probably earned his studio more money with Jurassic Park than Tarantino did in the 90s as a whole – but none were more recognisable, or interviewed, or talked about.
In some respects, Reservoir Dogs might have just been another hip indie thriller without Tarantino as its one-person marketing machine. Its script had been brought to Harvey Keitel’s attention in 1991, and the actor’s stature was enough to help Tarantino get a budget of $1.5m together as well as an enviable cast of character actors, including Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and Lawrence Tierney.
The plot, about a diamond heist gone wrong and the robbers violently turning on each other in the aftermath, was tailor-written for its budget: it largely took place in one location and its plot relied on tense exchanges rather than expensive set-pieces. What distinguished Reservoir Dogs, however, was Tarantino’s ability to place himself in the foreground; he took on a small role in the film – getaway driver Mr Brown – but his style is all over every scene. His taste in movies, his caffeinated way of talking, his musical interests, even his mannerisms (Madsen’s Mr Blonde looks and carries himself uncannily like Tarantino) are all front and centre.
When Tarantino took Reservoir Dogs to the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, he took a similarly extroverted approach to the movie business at large. About 15 years earlier, he’d left school in his mid-teens, having set his sights on getting into the film industry; he trained as an actor for six years, struggled to find work in his early 20s, before gradually realising that what he really wanted to do was direct. While he wrote scripts and plotted out a potential route to success, Tarantino famously worked at a Los Angeles VHS rental store, Video Archives, where he’d regale co-workers and customers with his encyclopaedic film knowledge.
Read more: Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic and its connections to the work of Paul Schrader
Far from fazed by presenting Reservoir Dogs to industry insiders and critics, Tarantino seemed to treat Sundance as an extension of his old job at the video shop. He’d talk at length to anyone who wanted an interview about his favourite movies and novels; the writer and lecturer Gerald Peary recalled in the introduction to his own 1998 book, Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, that the “young filmmaker answered all questions colourfully, knowledgeably, and without inhibition.”
Peary once interviewed Tarantino at the Montreal Film Festival that year, and afterwards, rather cheekily asked the filmmaker whether he’d like to talk to his students at Boston University, where Peary taught. To Peary’s surprise, Tarantino not only showed up a few weeks later, but proceeded to hold forth on the subject of French New Wave filmmaking for about an hour and a half.
What was striking about Tarantino’s persona, as his celebrity built over the course of 1992 and 1993, was how unapologetic he was in the face of criticism. Reservoir Dogs was praised for its pace and snappy dialogue, but it was also heavily criticised for its cruelty and violence (that the film only contained only two women, both treated appallingly, was also singled out.)
The scene in which Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde tortures a bound police officer with a razor wasn’t necessarily graphic, but critics were unsettled by the casualness of its sadism. Journalist Ella Taylor, who interviewed Tarantino in 1992, called Mr Blonde’s ‘ear scene’ an “exercise in spurious, sadistic manipulation”; Tarantino’s response was simply that “Violence is a very cinematic thing, like dance sequences are cinematic.”
If Reservoir Dogs was the low-budget film that put Tarantino on the map as a filmmaker, it was Pulp Fiction that turned him into a star. An LA noir thriller told out of sequence and packaged like a crime anthology magazine, Pulp Fiction was made on a lean budget of $8m, but went on to make over $200m at the box office. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; it revived John Travolta’s flagging career, and turned Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson into indescribably hip movie stars. Most students had a Pulp Fiction poster on their walls in the mid-90s – the one where Thurman coolly stares back at the viewer, smouldering cigarette in hand.
With all that celebrity, however, came a backlash. Critics had written negatively about Tarantino’s performance in his director friend Robert Rodriguez’s action thriller, Desperado, released in 1995. No fewer than three biographies had also been written about Tarantino in the wake of Pulp Fiction, at least one of them highlighting a falling out between him and writer Roger Avery.
“The media is fucking sick of me,” Tarantino told Peter Biskind in 1995. “It’s never been more evident than in reading reviews of Desperado. Because every review… is not about me being bad, but ‘We’re sick of this guy. We just don’t wanna see his face anymore.’ They’re not gonna give me a break for another couple of years on this… I just got through reading three, count ‘em, three, biographies of my life… They’re questioning my character – I’m really a bad person, I’ve fucked all the Video Archive guys, Roger Avery is the true genius behind all my work.”
Then came Four Rooms, an anthology film that had the novel concept of having each of its segments written and directed by a different filmmaker. Alongside Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell each made one of its four stories. Its production was difficult, and Tarantino had almost pulled out a week before filming was due to begin, saying, ‘I don’t want to do something I’m not excited about.’
When Rockwell received a call from Anders telling him about the Pulp Fiction filmmaker’s sudden cold feet, Rockwell’s response was akin to a character in one of Tarantino’s scripts. As Rockwell recalled to Peter Biskind in 1995, he was in hospital and ‘as high as a kite on morphine’ when Anders called him, and his reaction was: “You know what? He can’t back out. That’s just not one of the choices. If he checks that box, I’m going to get a gun and shoot him, and then he’ll experience violence first hand. He won’t have to watch it in a John Woo movie.”
Rediscovering the excitement that had previously eluded him, Tarantino made his segment after all – The Man From Hollywood, starring himself as fictional film director Chester Rush. The critical reaction to Four Rooms as a whole may have made him wish he hadn’t. Tarantino’s contribution wasn’t the most heavily criticised of the four, but all the same, the wider film’s failure – it quickly vanished from cinemas after its release in late 1995, barely making its $4m budget back – appeared to have rattled the filmmaker.
According to Gerald Peary, Tarantino was uncharacteristically quiet about Four Rooms, and seemingly didn’t participate in any interviews to help promote it. Peary wrote that he met Tarantino again just before the film’s release, and asked the directors if he’d like to go back to Boston University to give another lecture. Tarantino declined, saying, “I’m going to take a long vacation.”
Tarantino wasted little time licking his wounds, however. He wrote the script for the crime thriller-horror mashup From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by his friend Robert Rodriguez; perhaps as a middle finger to critics who wrote about their dislike of his acting, Tarantino took on a co-starring role alongside George Clooney. The Tarantino-isms are all here: criminals in cool suits, verbose dialogue, enthusiastic nods to crime writers and old exploitation movies.
Reviews were mixed, but From Dusk Till Dawn was a financial success. So was Jackie Brown – Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s thriller, Rum Punch – his final film of the 1990s, at least as a director. Neither film matched the financial highs of Pulp Fiction, however, and there was a sense, as the decade drew to a close, that Tarantino wanted to slow down the pace of work he’d blazed through up until 1995.
“After Pulp Fiction, I never really have to work again if I don’t want to,” he told journalist J Hoberman in 1996, near the release of From Dusk Till Dawn. “I’m going into my sabbatical. I want to just live life with my girlfriend… read books, reacquaint myself with friends, just have a good time.”
Tarantino’s continued to keep himself busy in the 2000s and 2010s – the likes of Kill Bill Volume 1 and Volume 2, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood were all successful, and have all found acclaim of one sort or another, whether it’s the visual invention of Kill Bill, Christoph Waltz’s unforgettably chilling turn in Inglourious Basterds, or his evocation of 1960s Los Angeles in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
As a public figure, though, Tarantino has never quite matched that 1994 era of Tarantinomania. Then again, there hasn’t been a filmmaker since who’s cut through the noise and chatter of pop culture as he did 30 years ago, either. Most people even casually acquainted with movies probably know who Christopher Nolan is. Many will be familiar with the fabulously grouchy promotional trails Ridley Scott embarks on each year. But Tarantino emerged at a unique moment in history: when movies held a cultural sway that they arguably don’t in the 21st century, and when the climate was right for a brash, working class filmmaker with nothing to lose to claw his way into the industry.
Tarantino once said that if he hadn’t become an actor and filmmaker, he’d probably have become a criminal. “When I was a teenager, I totally believed: I’m not going to get some nine-to-five job that I don’t like just so I can drive a Honda,” he said in 1996. I’ll take what I want. I did time in the county jail at three different times – all for bullshit – but, like, I’d rather go to jail than pay the money [for parking fines]… I always had illegal cars.”
There’s an element of self-mythology in here, as there often is when Tarantino talks about himself in interviews (which is a lot). All the same, it’s perhaps an apt summary of his attitude to the film industry in the 1990s: break in; ignore the shouting from passers-by; drive it like you stole it.
