Rosanna Arquette had to wait 30 years to be able to appreciate Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.”
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The actress, who plays the character Jody in the ensemble film, told Variety that she originally had to leave the 1994 film premiere as the feature was “so violent.” Arquette further reflected on the “cringe-worthy moments” in the Academy Award-winning script co-written by Roger Avary.
“I was pregnant when it came out, and I remember going into it and it was so violent my mom and I had to leave. So I’d never sat and watched it as a cinema experience until 30 years later at the Chinese Theatre [ during the TCM Film Festival retrospective ],” she said. “It’s still this cultural phenomenon, but also I still have the issue of, enough with the N-word. For me, that’s always been an issue, and I didn’t realize how much it was an issue until I saw it this last time. It’s still great filmmaking, but there’s cringe-worthy moments, and it’s usually not just the violence. But I do love [Tarantino] as a filmmaker.”
Arquette’s co-star Kathy Griffin, who has a cameo in the film, seemingly agreed to an extent.
“When I finally saw the movie, it was beyond expectations. Because on the page, I was like, fuck, this is gory. And there was the N-word, and then he said the N-word. And like any white person, I’m looking around at the Black people here, going, ‘What are they doing?'” Griffin said. “So a lot of it was shocking for its time. And yet when I saw the execution just as a fan, scene after scene after scene, I was like, ‘He fucking did it.’ I marveled at the performances, large and small. I want you to know that my three lines are the reason it won the Palme d’Or.”
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Producer Lawrence Bender further recalled how at the New York Film Festival screening of the film, an audience member fainted during the scene where Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace is stabbed with a needle after a drug overdose.
“The guy, he had a sugar shock or something,” Bender said of the theatergoer, “and that scene shocked him into this kind of thing where he fainted. So me and [fellow producer] Harvey Weinstein walk over, a couple of people help him up and they give him some orange juice. Harvey gives him his limousine and he takes him home so he can be fine, and everything’s fine. But now, the biggest fear Harvey and Bob had at the time was that people were going to see this movie as too violent, and they wanted to promote this movie and make it be a big hit. So now in the upstairs lobby, they’re pacing back and forth, ‘What do we do? If this gets out that this guy went into shock because of the violence in the movie, that’s going to be the only thing that people hear about.’ They’re freaking out. But the story did not get out, and the reviews were great. And that was the beginning of a successful launch of the movie.”
The film’s success not only resurrected John Travolta’s career, but also marked a turning point for Samuel L. Jackson. The frequent Tarantino collaborator recently tweeted on the 30th anniversary of the feature that “Pulp Fiction” changed his life.
“This movie launched like a rocket out of Cannes and changed my life. It debuted in theaters on this day in 1994 and I’ll always remember the audience reaction,” he wrote. “I knew this film was something special after that…AND 30 YEARS LATER, IT STILL IS.”
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