Marvin’s death scene in the back of the car (which didn’t hit no mother****ing bump) was originally a lot more gruesome.
Jules accidentally shoots Marvin in the throat, and is then forced to mercy-kill him with a headshot. Stretching the death scene out just came off as more dark than funny, though.
Remember how the coffee shop manager is cut off by Tim Roth in the middle of saying “I’m just a coffee shop-“?
Well that’s how the character’s name shows up in the credits: Coffee Shop.
Before directing Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino already had short screenplays written for The Gold Watch and the Vince and Mia sequence.
He intended to shoot them and use them to raise money for Reservoir Dogs but wound up not needing to.
When Bruce Willis read the script, he loved it so much that agreed to be in the film at “any price.”
This isn’t a common thing to do for an A list actor.
When John Travolta met Tarantino at Tarantino’s LA apartment to discuss the movie, it turned out to be the same apartment Travolta had lived in when he first came to LA as a struggling actor.
Danny DeVito was a producer on Pulp Fiction, and his and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characters in Twins were named, respectively, Julius and Vincent.
John Travolta’s character was originally going to be Vic Vega, aka Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, in Vince’s place.
When Michael Madsen was unable to act in the film, Tarantino rewrote those scenes to be about Vic’s brother, Vincent.
In Tarantino’s early career, he had a habit of chopping scripts up and piecing new ones together from the parts.
Jules’ famous “Ezekiel 25:17” speech, an altered version of a Bible passage, was written for Harvey Keitel’s preacher character in From Dusk til Dawn, which didn’t look like it would ever be produced at the time.
When Pulp Fiction came along and the Jules character needed some cold **** to say to someone before blowing their heads off, the Ezekiel 25:17 speech was perfect.
Most people know that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction share the same fictional version of LA, but did you know that this is the same setting as many other Tarantino movies, including Inglorious Basterds?
So Vince and Jules live in a world where WWII ended when Hitler was shot through the mustache and blown up in a movie theater.
No wonder it’s so much cooler than real life.