Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary have revealed the heroin-fuelled night out in Paris that inspired the latter’s film Killing Zoe.
Avary directed the bank heist film in 1993, starring Eric Stoltz (Pulp Fiction) and Jean-Hugues Anglade (Nikita) as two safe-crackers who attempt to rob a bank, with Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise) playing the titular Zoe, a sex worker who also happens to work at the bank.
The film was considered part of a wave of films from independent young filmmakers in Hollywood in the early ‘90s that also included Tarantino, with whom Avary would also devise the story for Pulp Fiction.
Now, in an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Tarantino and Avary have both discussed the whirlwind night in the French capital that led to the inception of the Killing Zoe screenplay.
They explained that Avary found himself needing to turn around a script for a bank heist film in short order, after producer Lawrence Bender found an ideal bank location while scouting for Reservoir Dogs.
“I had just been travelling through Europe,” said Avary. “I had been telling Quentin the stories, and he said, ‘Oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes A Trip‘.”
Tarantino quipped: “I still think it should’ve been called that.”
Avary continued: “I had been in Paris, I had bumped into a guy I knew who was from Los Angeles who was a French guy. He was like, ‘I’ll show you the real Paris’, and I went out with him and his friends – Henri, Jean, Claude, all of the characters from the movie.
“He drove me through Paris, and next thing I know, he’s doing heroin…He was like, ‘Now, we do heroin, hold my arm’. I did hold his arm, I had never seen anything like that…He was like, ‘Hold my arm while I shoot up.
“His friends were like, ‘Ohh, doing it through the nose doesn’t even affect me anymore’, and I’m like writing these lines down, like, ‘This is great shit!’.”
Avary added: “And so I get back and I told Quentin about this whole story. Basically everything in that movie was stuff that I’d actually seen. So when the time came to make it as a bank robbery film…it just became a movie about a guy going some place and everything he thought he knew was wrong. You haven’t seen your friend in a while, you go see him, it’s all about that friendship and that misconception.”
Avary has described Killing Zoe in the past as his attempt to make “an art-house film for both the coffeehouse crowd and the exploitation crowd”, and ultimately shot the film in downtown Los Angeles, despite it being set in France.
The film premiered at the Raindance Film Market in October 1993 and later screened at Sundance the following year and won the 1994 Cannes Prix Tres Special award.
Avary and Tarantino later picked up the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction, while Avary went on to make films such as The Rules Of Attraction and Lucky Day, and wrote screenplays for Silent Hill and Beowulf.
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