How Pulp Fiction made its creator a 'righteous man'

As Quentin Tarantino’s bolshy crime story celebrates its 30th anniversary, Geoffrey Macnab takes a look at the making of a film that completely disrespected all the rules of Hollywood’ ee” 2

- Geoffrey Macnab

At a Milwaukee breakfast event for evangelicals last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s new running mate JD Vance suddenly started riffing about Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic Pulp Fiction.

The scene that made such an impression on the Ohio politician and author of Hillbilly Ele is one of the bloodiest in the entire movie. Violent, bible-quoting gangster Jules (Samuel L Jackson), whom Vance calls “one of my favourite theologians”, has just shot a young crook. Out leaps another man, who has been hiding in the bathroom. “Die, you motherfuckers!” he yells, as he unloads three bullets in the direction of Jules and his partner Vincent (John Travolta). Somehow, the bullets all miss. Jules and Vincent raise their own guns in unison and kill the man. It’s at this point that Jules starts talking about “divine intervention”.

“We should be fucking dead... that shit wasn’t luck,” Jules says – a line strangely echoed in Trump’s remarks after surviving an assassination attempt earlier this month. (“I’m supposed to be dead!”) Bizarrely, Tarantino’s film, re-released in the UK next month to mark its 30th anniversary, has thus become part of the current US presidential election debate.

Then again, ever since its premiere at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Palme d’Or), the film has inspired near-religious devotion among huge swathes of fans worldwide. You’ll find Pulp Fiction references in everything from Ariana Grande videos to episodes of The Simpsons, but there has been nothing else quite like it, before or since. It isn’t surprising that Sight and Sound’s influential critics’ poll in 2022 ranked it among the greatest films ever made.