Hollywood's new hit men - writer-directors Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary and producer Lawrence Bender - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1994 by Godfrey Cheshire

The smart, violent, ultrahip B flicks made by writer-directors Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) and their producer Lawrence Bender (Fresh) are shaking the Hollywood crime thriller out of its tree. Interview talked to this trio of movie-mad moviemakers and to Oliver Stone, whose hallucinatory Natural Born Killers, originated by Tarantino, begins this cinema season of gloriously seedy deviance

It is already the stuff of movie legend, New Hollywood-style. Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary meet as clerks at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. They rent movies, watch movies, talk movies, fantasize avidly of making their own. Tarantino, after an abortive first effort, is aching for the plunge when he meets fledgling producer Lawrence Bender. Bender asks for a year to raise the money to make Tarantino's latest script; Tarantino gives him two months. With luck and a little help from Harvey Keitel, it flies.

The movie, Reservoir Dogs (1992), coins the '90s definition of cult glory. Though only an indie-scale success, it seems to hit every critic, cinephile, and aspiring filmmaker on the planet like a smart bomb from the B-movie id. Tarantino is established, as are his trademarks: tough-guy killers, wise-guy dialogue, jackknifed plots, pop-culture in-jokes, scalding ultraviolence played out in stylish spasms that reference everyone from Godard to Leone. A movieholic's coup, Dogs only begs the question of whether such knowingness might curdle into a postpomo shtick.

Flash-forward to 1994. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, produced by Bender with story contributions by Avary, shoots the sophomore jinx between the eyes when it wins the Cannes Film Festival's grand prize. Retaining the trademarks while adding bigger stars (John Travolta, Bruce Willis), the movie wraps lush wide-screen visuals around a three-compartment crime story that foregrounds Tarantino's increasingly assured audacity as a tale-spinner. Its mix of chills and hilarity reaches an unnerving apex when Travolta and Eric Stoltz attempt to revive an OD'd Uma Thurman with a hypodermic to the heart--a scene to place alongside Michael Madsen's ear-chopping frug in Dogs.

Meanwhile, like a battalion-devouring blob from '50s sci-fi, the Tarantino-Bender-Avary vortex continues its centripetal spiral. Pre-Dogs Tarantino scripts come to light in Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers--the latter heavily rewritten, to its author's dismay. Bender also produces first-time director Boaz Yakin's Fresh, a bracingly inventive tale of crime and redemption in New York's ghettos, and he and Tarantino join forces to executive-produce Avary's directorial debut, Killing Zoe.

Avary's film stars Eric Stoltz as Zed, basically the same character he plays in Pulp Fiction, and abounds in bloody criminal excess, but its account of a Parisian bank heist gone fatally awry is as coolly naturalistic as Tarantino's films are unabashedly pop. Comparisons to the Sidney Lumet of Dog Day Afternoon (1975) should suit Avary fine, since they remove him from his friend's shadow while acknowledging a parallel set of cinephilic concerns; in a less obvious way than Tarantino's films, Killing Zoe bristles with movie mania.

Do these guys know something that Hollywood forgot sometime during the '70s, Avary and Tarantino's favorite movie decade? Is their work the mark of a decisive forward turn in a form that desperately needs one, an anomaly founded on friendship, or a regression to that age-old place where boys play with movie cameras in order to play with guns? Meeting the two directors and Bender in Hollywood in June, I'm momentarily stunned when Tarantino declares topic number one--violence--off-limits. I regroup by wondering whether, for all of us, childhood's earliest fascinations link movies with mayhem.

GODFREY CHESHIRE: One of my primal movie memories is the killing that climaxes John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962]. After seeing that, three friends and I would enact it over and over. Coincidentally or not, this was the first time I ever noticed a director's name and thought, "This is really good. I'll have to go see his next movie." Any similar memories?

ROGER AVARY: When I was really young, Dawn of the Dead [1978] made a big impression on me. When it first came out and we used to go play guns, we would have a rule that once you were shot and died you'd come back as a zombie and be unstoppable. Me and a friend got this big piece of wood and actually built a mall and a big forest, and we'd get little H-O-train guys and bust their arms off and paint them red and make them look like zombies. The game was you've got to get into the mall and get to the helicopter before the zombies eat you alive.

LAWRENCE BENDER: My first real thing was with Dirty Harry [1971]. My parents were divorced, so my dad had us on the weekends, and he took me and my friends to the movies. I remember we'd come out shooting at each other and jumping over the turnstiles and banging through the doors.