Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction's Influence

How I got introduced to you, I'd heard about Reservoir Dogs, but the first film I saw was Pulp Fiction. And I saw Pulp Fiction with this girl that I was dating when I first moved to Los Angeles. And I remember being in man's Chinese theater watching this. And for me it was like this crazy change in my life. That was in the first few weeks of it opening, yeah, because that's where it opened. Yeah. Crazy change in my life, moving to Los Angeles and then seeing this film. I remember very clearly at the end of the film, even in the middle of the film, going, this is the craziest fucking movie I've ever seen in my life. And it symbolized to me the world was changing, everything was changing. It was so wild and so crazy. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. All the different timelines, how you interwove everything together. But the violence and the chaos and the humor of all of it. People walked out of that movie theater fucked up. And I remember thinking like, wow, the world is different. Sometimes you'll see a work of art, a something, and you'll say that thing just changed everything. It was so wild that it influenced so many other films afterwards. They tried to be like a Pulp Fiction movie or they tried to be wild. Well people would ask me about that and they'd go, hey, did that really bug you when there was a period of it seemed like five years in the 90s where every crime film had this ironic bit and they talked about TV shows and played music in a weird way and everybody was a smart ass. And they asked me, well, did that bother you? And I go, well, no, it doesn't bother me. I don't think any of them are as good as mine. So it just makes mine look better and better and my dialogue look better and better. One of my favorite directors is Sergio Leone. And I always considered I was doing two traditional gangster films like Scorsese, kind of Goodfellow kind of movies, what he was doing to traditional westerns when he did his Spaghetti Westerns. So then the fact that mine hit and now the fact that I've not... It wasn't that they were just trying to do Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. They weren't trying to exist in the same sub genre of crime film that I had created, which is what all the other Spaghetti Westerns that came after Leone's had done. So the fact that it wasn't they were doing just Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction ripoffs. I created a sub genre in gangster films that did not exist before and they were trying to fill that sub genre and that was fucking awesome. That's got to be a wild feeling. It was great. I had affected gangster films. By that point to do kind of a Scorsese kind of thing was like almost passé. Yeah. Well, you brought back John Dravolta, which is pretty wild too. Well, I remember even asking somebody, I go, okay, when people say Tarantino-esque, what do they mean? There was a guy I knew, he's like a film analyst, his name Dave Scow. And he goes, well, okay, just to give you an idea. It's like, okay, so in Bad Boys, yeah, I think maybe no, it's like Bad Boys. I go, well, again, Bad Boys. You have a couple of henchmen working for the bad guy and they're sitting in their car and all of a sudden they have a conversation about an I Love Lucy episode. That wouldn't have happened without you. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what is that from? I mean, where have you had this flair for references and this way of layering? That just comes from being Gen X, man. I mean, that was the whole thing about that generation is the idea that... Okay, the generation before us that lived through the 60s, they had the 60s, they had the accoutrement in the 60s, they had all that 60s music. And they looked down on the generation that grew up in the 70s. So you didn't have any of that shit. You didn't have the music that we had. Well, maybe we didn't have the music you had. We had our music. But what we did have is we had television. We had the Saturday morning cartoons that we dug. We had Schoolhouse Rock. We had all the TV shows we liked. We had Speed Racer. We had all these kinds of things and they meant something to us. And kids back then who if their parents didn't let them watch TV at a certain point, well, the parents might have actually had the best intentions, but they were actually... They were actually robbing their children of the pop cultural glue that's gonna tie them to their generation when they get older. And so we had the ABC Movies of the Week. We had all that stuff and we had fucking great movies if you're going out and seeing the movies The New Hollywood. We had all that. And so when we got older, it was about talking about that stuff. That was what was worth talking about. And then to actually have characters in a movie talk about that, that was making them sound realistic and to be specific about it. Remember that old sitcom? No, no, no. Talk about... No, you mean Alice. Okay. Talk about... You talk about Mel and Alice. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips. Actually seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.