Elmore Leonard: On Writing and Movies

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

The late, great American crime writer Elmore Leonard penned over 40 books and numerous short stories in a career spanning sixty years. As one of America’s most distinctive and influential genre novelists his work inspired television shows and several fine films. The following abridged excerpts are from an interview by Patrick McGilligan for Film Comment on Leonard’s experience of working in Hollywood and his reaction to film adaptations of his work. It was published to coincide with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Leonard’s Rum Punch (as Jackie Brown).

To what extent do you think your writing was influenced by movies, even before you began selling stories to Hollywood?

Probably more than I thought. When I started writing, I wanted to make money right away and I chose Westerns because of the market. You could aim for Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Esquire, Argosy, Adventure, and a number of pulp magazines, like Dime Western, that were still in business. I liked Western movies and they were big in the Fifties.

So when you were writing a story, you were thinking of it, from the outset, as a possible movie?

That was my hope.

Was it just accidental that the stories you were writing, with so much dialogue, almost resembled scripts?

It happened that my style did lend itself – the way I learned to write in scenes, with a lot of dialogue. I think initially I learned as much as I could from Hemingway, and then the style I developed seemed to apply itself to movies: scenes leading to scenes, character development, but always enough action, too.

On the first story he sold to the movies: ‘3:10 toYuma’:

How did that get sold? What was the process whereby you were ‘discovered’?

The story was in Dime Western, 4500 words; I got ninety dollars for it. The editor insisted I rewrite one of the scenes and do two revisions on my description of the train. He said, ‘You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?’ He made me work for my ninety bucks, which was good. It was in the magazine, and then within a year a producer saw it and bought it.

The Tall T (Directed by Budd Boetticher)

How about ‘The Tall T’ (57)?

That was a novella in Argosy, which sold to Hollywood fairly quickly. I found out later that Batjac, John Wayne’s company, had bought it originally, and then something happened and he passed it on to Randolph Scott and [producer] Harry Joe Brown. They also added about twenty minutes onto the front end, which I thought gave it an awfully slow opening.

And you had nothing to do with the people in Hollywood who made the movie?

No. I saw that one in a screening room with Detroit newspaper critics. I remember the film coming to the part where Randolph Scott has Maureen O’Sullivan lure Skip Homeier into the cave. Randolph Scott comes in and faces Skip Homeier, who has a sawed-off shot-gun in his hand. One of the critics said, ‘Here comes the obligatory fistfight.’ But Randolph Scott grabs the shotgun, sticks it under Skip Homeier’s chin, pulls the trigger, and the screen goes red. They didn’t say anything after that.

You might say that was a ‘defining Elmore Leonard moment.’ You have become known for surprising, brutal violence in your stories. How did you come by that penchant?

I wasn’t writing for Range Romance, I was writing action stories, six-guns going off, violence a natural part of it, the reason for reading a Western. But never, in 30 short stories and eight novels, did I stage a fast-draw shootout in the street, the way practically every Western movie ends. Later I developed ways of having the violence happen more unexpectedly and low-key. ‘And he shot him.’

The Moonshine War (Directed by Richard Quine)

When is the first time you actually went to Hollywood to work on a screenplay?

In ‘68 or ‘69, with The Moonshine War. [...] I’d go out to Hollywood, stay all week, and go home weekends. I spent at least three weeks out there before [the producer] Ransohoff fired me from the picture. He said, ‘You’re too close to the forest to see the trees.’

Was he right?

No, not then. Now, when I think of adapting my own stuff, I think there’s truth in that. Definitely. But it’s not so much that you’re too close to it. It’s just that all of your enthusiasm went into the original, so how do you get it back up to write the screenplay? To me, if the writing process isn’t enormously satisfying, it isn’t worth doing. I love writing books. I wrote movies for money.

What did you do for those three weeks?

Met with [director] Dick Quine. I’d go to his house every day and we would sit around and talk about what we were going to do; and then Chris Mankiewicz would come over – he was the liaison between Ransohoff and us – and talk in broad, general terms, never specific, about what should be in the picture. I thought we just wasted an awful lot of time, until finally I wrote the script and then I was fired.

They had another writer for maybe a week and then I was hired back on. Quine liked me and got me back. Ransohoff also had a phonetically written script done by a professor at the University of Kentucky, I think, indicating what the dialogue would sound like with that kind of a rural Southern accent. I kept thinking, Why in the hell don’t they just get good actors who can fake it, or actors born in the South?

Joe Kidd (Directed by John Sturges)

Then they ended up shooting the picture in California, not far from Stockton, in the only clump of trees in a rather barren landscape of dun-colored hills. The picture was also miscast. Let’s face it, Dick Quine was not the guy to direct a picture about people who live in ‘hollers’ and talk funny. He had done mainly comedies that were hip at that time: How to Murder Your Wife, Paris When It Sizzles. The Moonshine War didn’t stand a chance.

Did anybody ask your advice about casting?

They always ask, but they don’t pay any attention to the writer. Richard Widmark I thought was all wrong for the part of the [bootlegger] – I had pictured someone like Burl Ives with a little 16-year-old girl sitting on his knee. I did visit the set for a couple of days. After a number of takes of one scene, Patrick McGoohan came off the set, walked up to me, and said, ‘What’s it like to stand there and hear your lines all fucked up?’

Do you feel that what went wrong there was not the script, but everything else – the casting, the locations, the director… ?

There were things about the story I had been obliged to change. In all of my screenplays, I’ve always gone against my better judgment in listening to the director or the producer, doing what they want so I can get the money and go home and write a book. Or thinking, Well, they know what they’re doing – even though something is telling me, Nah, that’s not gonna work.

Joe Kidd (Directed by John Sturges)

On working with Clint Eastwood and John Sturges on ‘Joe Kidd’ (72):

How much did Clint have to do with the script?

Eastwood and Sturges would come into my office at the end of the day and read the scenes I had written. Eastwood is the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I don’t recall him changing that much. He would just agree and pass the pages on to Sturges. The only time I can recall him saying anything was for the scene where Joe Kidd is confronted by an armed faction, near the end of the second act. Eastwood said, ‘Shouldn’t I have my gun out when I say that?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think you need to have your gun out.’ Eastwood said, ‘But my character has not been presented as a gunfighter.’ He turned to Sturges, ‘Don’t you think I need my gun out?’ Sturges said, ‘No, you don’t need your gun out.’ Eastwood said, ‘Why not?’ Sturges said, ‘Because the audience knows who you are – they’ve seen all your pictures.’ But when the picture was made, Eastwood did have his gun out.

Get Shorty (Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld)

Was ‘Get Shorty’ (95) a totally positive experience?

All the way. I must admit I was surprised to see the film had become a comedy. I told [director] Barry Sonnenfeld after I saw it, ‘I don’t write comedy.’ He said, ‘No, but it’s a funny book.’ Barry and [screenwriter] Scott Frank were conscientious about sticking to the plot and using as much of the dialogue as they could. The lines were delivered the way they were written, seriously, the way I’d heard the characters when I was writing their lines. Gene Hackman was delivering his lines one day in rehearsal, and Barry said, ‘Gene, that was really funny,’ and Hackman said, ‘Well, I wasn’t trying to be.’ Barry said, ‘That’s the whole idea.’

I do think my books were getting a little funnier as I loosened up, toward the mid-Seventies. I had become a little freer and easier in the way I was writing – not trying so hard to write – and funny things began to happen to the characters.

Going back to The Big Bounce in ‘68, however, I've been working pretty much with the same characters: ordinary people who seem a bit quirky, non-heroes, spending as much time with the bad guys – who usually aren’t too bright – as I do with the more sympathetic characters. I have an affection for all of them, so I treat them as human beings with much the same desires and hangups we all have. Plot is secondary, not that important to me. Once I know my characters I’m confident a plot will come out of them. I make it up as I go along, not knowing what’s going to happen, never knowing how the book will end.

Get Shorty (Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld)

‘Not knowing what is going to happen’ is part of the comedy, it seems to me. Part of the Elmore Leonard experience. There are always amazing plot twists in your stories.

What’s amazing to me, when I think about it, is that while Hollywood in general prefers plot driven stories – they ask, ‘What’s it about?’ – 33 of my 35 books, all character-driven and talky, have either been optioned or bought outright for film. I write a book not knowing what’s going to happen, so I won’t be bored, so I can entertain myself making it up as I go along, establishing characters in the first act I hope to be able to use later on, for a set-piece or two if not turns in the plot. If a plot twist is amazing, as you suggest, it must be at the same time believable. So I write each scene from a character’s point of view, with the character’s ‘sound’ providing the rhythm of the prose and the believability of what’s taking place in the scene. The reader accepts it because the character is there. It might not be acceptable from my point of view, were I an omniscient author who thinks he knows everything. Their ‘sound’ is much more entertaining than mine, so I try to keep my nose out of it. I don’t want the reader ever to be aware of me writing. And if the prose sounds like it was written, I rewrite it.

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

On ‘Jackie Brown’, did you read Quentin Tarantino’s script?

Yeah. It’s pretty much the book, with a lot of Tarantino, of course, a lot of additional dialogue.

Did you give Tarantino any input?

I questioned a couple of things, asked why scenes we both liked were left out. But I only spoke to him twice on the phone. The first time was a couple of years ago, when he was just beginning and told me he was going to do Rum Punch instead of Killshot. That was all I heard from him for about a year and a half, until just before he started shooting, in early June [‘96], when he called again. He said, ‘I've been afraid to call you for the last year.’ I said, ‘Why? Because you’ve changed the title and you’re starring a black woman in the lead?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do what you want. You’re the filmmaker, you’re going to do what you want anyway.’

I was on the set twice, and both times it looked like he was enjoying himself. I met Sam Jackson and Pam Grier, who looked terrific, and I could see why Quentin wanted her. Bridget Fonda I’d met before, doing publicity for Touch, and I was happy to see her in the picture. I trusted Quentin and felt certain the film would work; though I suppose there will be a few smartass critics waiting to take a shot at him.

So, all of a sudden, you’re ‘hot.’

It doesn’t seem that long ago I had hopes of being the hot kid, selling my first story in ‘51 when I was 25. I got on the cover of Newsweek in April 1985, and was seen as an overnight success after little more than thirty years. Now I’m 72 and still at it, writing a sequel to Get Shorty that puts Chili Palmer in the music business, where, with his mob-connected background, he should feel right at home. In doing the research, learning about the record industry, the success of Get Shorty has opened all the doors. We’ve even had Aerosmith over to the house to drink non-alcoholic beer and play tennis. MGM, Jersey Films, and John Travolta all seem optimistic that it will happen. I am, too, but I have to finish writing the book before we’ll know if is any good. Or even what it’s about.

– ‘On Writing and Movies. Elmore Leonard interviewed by Patrick McGilligan’. Film Comment Magazine. 

Method Writing: Tarantino and Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans in 1925, moving to Detroit when he was six years old where he lived for the rest of his life. Following high-school graduation, Leonard served in the US Navy, then after graduating from the University of Detroit became a copywriter for an advertising agency. At the same time, Leonard was pursuing a burgeoning writing career, something he’d been interested in since childhood. His initial interest was in the Western genre. After the success of his novel Hombre, successfully filmed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman,  Leonard decided to quit his job to write full-time. As the Western genre became less fashionable, Leonard turned his attention to crime novels, and was immediately successful. He has since received multiple honours including the Edgar, National Book Award, and the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. His novels Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown (based on the novel Rum Punch), Hombre, and 3:10 to Yuma have all been turned into major motion pictures. He is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest crime writers. Leonard died in 2013.

Initially published in the Jan/Feb 1998 issue of Creative Screenwriting the following interview with Quentin Tarantino was conducted shortly after the release of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Described as ‘a comic crime caper based on Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch,’ Jackie Brown was Tarantino’s first adaptation. Tarantino’s screenplay closely follows Leonard’s plot line, dropping some minor characters, developing others (most notably Ordell Robbie), while inserting some new scenes. Tarantino has openly acknowledged the impact of Leonard’s writing on his own writing style: ‘Leonard opened my eyes to the dramatic possibilities of everyday speech’, he claims. In Jackie Brown Tarantino successfully defers to Elmore Leonard’s low-life naturalism to produce arguably his most mature work. In discussing Leonard and his writing roots Tarantino sheds light into his world and his technique as a ‘method writer.’

CS: How exactly have Elmore Leonard’s books influenced your writing style?

QT: Well, when I was a kid and I first started reading his novels I got really caught up in his characters and the way they talked. As I started reading more and more of his novels it kind of gave me permission to go my way with characters talking around things as opposed to talking about them. He showed me that characters can go off on tangents and those tangents are just as valid as anything else. Like the way real people talk. I think his biggest influence on any of my things was True Romance. Actually, in True Romance, I was trying to do my version of an Elmore Leonard novel in script form. I didn’t rip it off, there’s nothing blatant about it, it’s just a feeling you know, and a style I was inspired by more than anything you could point your finger at.

CS: The strongest scene in True Romance is the confrontation between Cliff [played by Dennis Hopper] and Coccotti [played by Christopher Walken]. How did you approach crafting that scene?

QT: The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way. I had heard that whole speech about the Sicilians a long time ago, from a black guy living in my house. One day I was talking with a friend who was Sicilian and I just started telling that speech. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is a great scene, I gotta remember that.’ In True Romance the one thing I knew Cliff had to do was insult the guy enough that he’d kill him, because if he got tortured he’d end up telling him where Clarence was, and he didn’t want to do that. I knew how the scene had to end, but I don’t write dialogue in a strategic way. I didn’t really go about crafting the scene, I just put them in the room together. I knew Cliff was going to end up doing the Sicilian thing but I didn’t know what Coccotti was going to say. They just started talking and I jotted it down. I almost feel like a fraud for taking credit for writing dialogue, because it’s the characters that are doing it. To me it’s very connected to actors’ improv with me playing all the characters. One of the reasons I like to write with pen and paper is it helps that process, for me anyway.

True Romance (Directed by Tony Scott)

CS: What’s the relationship between your acting and your writing?


QT: I think they’re almost inseparably married. When I describe things in my writing I never use writing adjectives. I don’t know what a writing adjective is. I always use acting adjectives. To me writing’s almost the same thing because you’re acting like a character and that’s what acting is all about, the moment. You don’t want to be result oriented, you don’t want to say, ‘Okay, this is what’s going to happen.’ No, you start with your character and anything can happen, like life. You shouldn’t try to predestine where you’re gonna go and what you’re gonna see. You can hit the nail on the head, but you want the kind of freedom that allows for something you hadn’t even imagined to happen. I’m very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it’s way into the piece.


CS: Can you think of an example where your perspective at a certain moment really changed the way you approached something?


QT: Well anything that’s really personal I wouldn’t want to talk about because that’s not what the scene’s about, it’s just underneath it there. But like something more on the surface would be Vince’s whole thing in Pulp Fiction about Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam for the very first time in my life when I was writing that script and it was kind of blowing my mind. And it was blowing Vince’s mind too, he’d just come back from there too. When I spent time in Amsterdam I was just going there to be by myself, but it worked its way in ‘cause that is what I was going through and that was gold.


CS: What adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s books do you admire?


QT: I liked Get Shorty a lot, I guess where he was funny and I really liked 52 Pick-Up. I think that’s the only other crime one that I’ve really liked.


CS: Did other adaptations suggest anything for your own approach?


QT: No, I’ve never really felt that anyone got [Leonard] in the prime zone.


CS: What about Scott Frank’s adaptation of Get Shorty?


QT: Well it’s funny because he came pretty damn close. I actually read his script and thought he did a really good job with it. But there was still something lost in the translation. I’ve always been kind of a perfectionist about the idea of adapting a Leonard novel because I just wanted to have the feeling of the novel, those long dialogue scenes where a character is slowly revealed. To me, that’s the fun of adapting it. I’m not dissing Frank at all. I think he did a great job with Get Shorty, but there’s another aspect of Leonard’s novels that I’m interested in.

True Romance (Directed by Tony Scott)

CS: You’ve voiced concern in the past that your own voice, your own dialogue might someday become old hat, that people might grow tired of it. Was that one of the reasons you decided to go with an adaptation rather than an original script for your next film?

QT: Well, that wasn’t the reason but it does very conveniently serve that purpose. It’s a nice way of kind of holding onto my dialogue, of holding onto my gift and whatever I’ve got to offer. I don’t want people to take me for granted. The things I have to offer I don’t want wasted. When you watch something David Mamet’s written you know you’ve listened to David Mamet dialogue. I want to try and avoid that if I can. I want to try to avoid that as a writer and I want to try to avoid it as a filmmaker. I want people to see my new movie not my next movie. Does that make sense? You’ve gotta remember, I’ve done two movies before this, so wait till I’ve done six movies to start pigeonholing me. I tend to do different types of things. Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, and my script for Natural Born Killers take place in kind of my own universe. But that doesn’t make them fantastical. Larry McMurtry writes with his own universe. J.D. Salinger writes with his own universe and it’s a very real universe and I think mine is too. But having said all that, this movie doesn’t take place in my universe.

CS: It doesn’t?

QT: This is in Elmore Leonard’s universe and it was interesting making a movie outside this little universe that I created. This was Dutch’s universe, and because of that, I wanted it to be ultra-realistic. I used a different cinematographer to kind of get a different look. It still looks great but just a little bit more down to earth, a little less like a movie movie, a little bit more like a '70s Straight Time. I actually like building sets. In Jackie Brown I didn’t do that. Every single solitary scene in the movie was shot on location. Some things were written for specific locations in the south [of LA] that I went out and found.

CS: I think one of your great strengths as a writer is that you have been able to define your own vision, your own universe, and set your stories within that. In looking at the difference between that and where you see Jackie Brown, what elements would you say define the Tarantino universe of film?

True Romance (Directed by Tony Scott)

QT: Well, that’s kind of a hard question to answer because a whole lot of this stuff is subliminal. It just comes out. One of the ways other writers have created their own universe is through overlapping characters, which I think is very interesting.

CS: I understand what you’re saying about it being kind of subliminal but you’re also a smart guy. I’m sure you get analytical about some of it too, especially as far as where you take your universe.

QT: To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I really try not to do that. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and, as I’ve said, go with the moment and go with my guts. It’s different than when you’re playing games or trying to be clever. To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you’re writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can’t lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves. And that’s something I don’t see in a lot of Hollywood movies. I see characters lying all the time. They can’t do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can’t do anything good or bad, they can only do something that’s true or not. Basically, my writing’s like a journey. I’ll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I’ll make some of those stops and some of them I won’t. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you’re going to do. It’s all the scenes in the middle that you’ve got to—not struggle, it’s never a struggle—but you’ve got to write through—that’s where your characters really come from. That’s how you find them, that’s where they live. So I’ve got basic directions of how to get to where I’m going, but now I’m starting the journey. I can always refer to my directions if I get lost, but barring that, let’s see what we see. I think that is how novelists write. That’s how Elmore Leonard writes.

CS: Do you think that repetition of a phrase or word in dialogue enhances its power for an audience or detracts from it?

QT: Well I do that a lot. I like it. I think that in my dialogue there’s a bit of whatever you would call it, a music or poetry, and the repetition of certain words helps give it a beat or a rhythm. It just happens and I just go with it, looking for the rhythm of the scene.

CS: Some people have criticized your use of certain words such as ‘nigger,’ and you have always responded that no word should have that much power in our culture. I’m not sure I buy that. I’ve got to be frank. Aren’t you also using powerful words to electrify your dialogue, to make it more interesting?

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

QT: You know, if you didn’t know me, I could see where you’d come up with that. I mean, I am a writer, I deal in words. No, there is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It’s all language, it’s all communication. And if I was doing what you’re saying, I’d be lying. I’d be throwing in a word to get an effect. And well, you do that all the time, you throw in a word to get a laugh, and you throw in this word to get an effect too, that happens, but it’s all organic. It’s never a situation where that’s not what they would say, but I’m going to have them say it because it’s gonna be shocking. You used the example of ‘nigger.’ In Pulp Ficiton, nigger is said a bunch of different times by a bunch of different people and it’s meant differently each time. It’s all about the context in which it’s used. George Carlin does a whole routine about that, you know. When Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy do their stand-up acts, and say nigger, you’re never offended because they’re niggers. You know what they’re fucking talking about. You know the context in which it’s coming from. The way Samuel Jackson says nigger in Pulp Fiction is not the way Eric Stoltz says it, is not the way Ving Rhames says it. They’re all coming from different places. That word means something different depending on who’s saying it.


CS: Ordell uses ‘nigga’ a lot in Jackie Brown. How is his use of the word different than that of the characters in Pulp Fiction?

QT: Actually Ordell probably doesn’t use it any different from Jules. Actually when Jules and Marcellus use it in Pulp Fiction they’re comin’ from the same place, but having it mean different things. Marcellus is very much like, ‘You my nigger now,’ and that was Ving Rhames who came up with that. But Ordell’s comin’ from the same place, he’s a black guy who throws the word around a lot, it’s just part of his dialect, the way he talks. And if you’re writing a black dialect, there’s certain words that you need to make it musical. Nigger’s one of them. If you’re writing about that kind of a guy, motherfucker’s another. Those are two of the key words that are appropriate for that guy. Sam Jackson uses nigger all of the time in his speech, that’s just who he is and where he comes from. That’s the way he talks, so that’s the way Ordell talks. Now what do you have to say to that?!

CS: That’s a good question! I think you have a valid point if that’s where you’re going with the character. Certainly the word nigger is part of the universe you’ve created. It’s one of the things that stands out about your writing.

QT: Also, I’m a white guy who’s not afraid of that word. You know most white guys are deathly afraid of that word.

CS: You’re right.

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

QT: I just don’t feel the whole white guilt and pussy-footing around race issues. I’m completely above all that. I’ve never worried about what anyone might think of me ‘cause I’ve always believed that the true of heart recognize the true of heart. If I’m doing what I’m doing and you’re comin from the same place, you’ll see it, no question about it. And if you’re comin with an axe to grind, with your own baggage and your own hate, then you might react strongly to where I’m comin from. Now what I just said there is that if you have a problem with my stuff you’re a racist. I practically said that. Well, I truly believe that.

CS: You always tend to write long, I mean 500 pages for Pulp Fiction, and then cut back. Do you think that’s a good process in bringing out the best in material?

QT: It works good for me, all right, but I don’t actually think about anything like that, for most of the script. I start getting responsible about length in the third act. You can do all kinds of shit at the beginning of the movie that you don’t have the fuckin’ patience for when it gets to the end. You want to see how it ends. I also tried to get away from 120 pages on Jackie Brown. I think in the screenplay there is too damn much importance given to the page count. It's structural thing. I mean, when it came to Jackie Brown, it was like you know what? I'm in a position now I can just say fuck the page count. I know the movie's gonna be about two-and-a-half hours long. All this page count stuff is for the production manager. It has nothing to do with me. So I'm not gonna dumb down my writing to keep the page count down. I end up still kind of pulling back towards the very end of the process because it was getting pretty excessive. But you know it used to be I would write all this description and everything and I would be all happy with it and I would be battling page count by the end, and it would just turn into Vincent and Jules walk into a room and start talking. On this one I'm not gonna even fucking worry about it. Also because now my scripts are getting published now, this is gonna be the fucking document. I'm not writing novels, these screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

CS: How did the writing of Jackie Brown differ from Pulp Fiction?

QT: It was kind of funny because when I wrote Pulp Fiction I wrote that by myself. The middle story I adapted from a script that Roger Avery wrote, but you know it was me at page one and it was me at the end. It wasn't like we were doing it together or anything. I adapted it myself and I made all these changes I was gonna do. My name alone is on the script for Jackie Brown, I'm the guy that did it. But, I think Elmore Leonard almost deserves credit on the script. We never talked about anything but there was a real collaboration . . . actually I was the one doing all the collaborating. So much in fact, that I kept a lot of his dialogue exactly the way it was and I wrote a lot of my own and now as time has gone on, I don't really almost remember what was mine and what was his. I don't think his stuff stands out or my stuff stands out—I think it works like a really happy marriage.

Pulp Fiction (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

CS: You've optioned four of Leonard's books? Why did you make Rum Punch first?

QT: Again, it was extremely organic. I actually read Rum Punch before it was published. It turns out Elmore Leonard's agent is a really really good friend of Lawrence Bender, my producing partner. So they sent us the book and I loved it, but I didn’t want to do his books as big budget movies, because they are actually very modest stories and can’t bear a $50 million price tag. So we were getting ready to go into Pulp Fiction, and were talking about a deal where we could option it for very little money and shoot it for very little money. But his agent very rightfully said, ‘Now guys if we’re gonna do this, and he’s gonna pass up millions of dollars, you guys gotta commit to do this after Pulp Fiction.’ You can never really do that, all right, cause who knows who I'm gonna be after I get done with a movie. I couldn't really commit to it 100 per cent, so I let it go. And it so happened it became available again with these other three novels. I was going to give it to another director to do, so I read it again so I could talk about it. In reading it again I remembered exactly what it was I wanted to do when I read it a long time ago, it was like I saw the movie that I made in my head a long time ago, and let go of, that movie came right back. It came right right back. That’s what I'm gonna do. So that's how that one became the one. You know if you love something, set it free? Well I did, and it came back!

CS: Were there any techniques or any ideas you had, to bring the numerous ‘talking head’ scenes in Jackie Brown to life? To keep the interest of the audience?

QT: It was funny ‘cause I thought about that when I was writing the script. There were a whole lot of scenes with people talking to each other, right? But I thought about it and said, ‘That’s what it is. Don't be afraid of what it is.’ All right? And I made a pact with myself that there are two different styles going on here—the first half is about character and the second half is about action.

CS: Okay.

QT: I’m not necessarily going to try to show off to the world what a great filmmaker I am in the first half. ‘Cause the way you service that is you just get the best single performance you can from the actors and you edit it the right way so that their best work is showing and then you can have talk for ten fuckin’ minutes, twenty minutes or an hour, it doesn't fuckin’ matter. But in the second half we’re going to crank it up. It almost ties back to what you were saying about the editing really kicking in in the third act. There was a lot less flash there I mean, just boom, boom, boom, boom, as opposed to the longer character scenes up front. Yeah, definitely.

Pulp Fiction (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

CS: In reading your interviews you shield it a little bit, but I think you take a little pride in the way you presented Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in non-linear formats. In Jackie Brown you moved to a linear format. Why did you decide that? Was it just the material?

QT: Yeah, I'm proud of what I did in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I’m not too proud of it, ‘cause I think that everyone should be able to do that, and it just seemed like the best way to present those stories. I don’t have any one way to tell a story, all right. I don’t have any rule book of how it’s supposed to be done, you know? But I’ve always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I’ll tell it that way. I won’t jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don’t do anything in my script just to be clever. That’s the first thing that goes, it has to . . .

CS:. . . be true to itself?

QT: Yeah, emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it's great. That’s what you want. In the case of Jackie Brown, this story is told better this way. And the sequence where the money is switched three times? That’s how I saw it when I read the book. It’s not in the book that way, but that’s how I saw it.

CS: That’s interesting on the screen.

QT: Yeah, I love it. I was just watching the movie in my mind as I was reading the book and thought, ‘That would be really cool.’ Before Jackie Brown, the most interesting character I ever wrote was Mia [in Pulp Fiction].

CS: Why is that?

QT: Because I have no idea where she came from. I have no idea whatsoever. She’s not from another movie, she’s not somebody I know, she’s not a fantasy girl, she’s not really a part of me, she’s not a side of me. I knew when I was writing that story, I knew nothing more about Mia than Vincent did. All I knew were the rumors. I didn’t know who she was at all, until they got to Jack Rabbit Slim’s and she opened her mouth. Then all of a sudden this character emerged with her own rhythm of speech. I don’t know where she came from and that's why I love her.

Natural Born Killers (Directed by Oliver Stone)

CS: When you’re developing a character, what do you do to get into their mind? Do you do a kind of back story on them? What do you do to get a character down?

QT: That’s a very interesting question. Maybe I should actually—I don’t. I do that as an actor though. That’s very interesting. Maybe I should start doing that in my original stuff or even on this stuff. No, in the case of Jackie Brown by the time I started writing the script I was pretty damn familiar with the material so I felt I knew these people. I don’t know, because part of that process is discovering them as I’m writing them. It’s different from acting. I won’t even think now about acting in a role where I didn’t do a back story for a character. Sit down with pen and paper and bring them up to this point. All right. But there’s a birthing process when you’re writing.

CS: In the past you’ve been real open about how you’ve cannibalized your own work in building new scripts. Is that a way of drawing stories into your own unique universe?

QT: Initially, when I first started doing stuff like that it was just so I didn’t have to write that part of it, it was a way to save time and pages. But it never quite works like a slam dunk anymore. By the time I get through with it I’ve usually rewritten it so much to make it work for whatever I’m doing that I might as well have written a new scene. I haven’t done that in a while actually.

CS: I didn’t notice any borrowing in Jackie Brown.

QT: Oh yeah, not at all. I think it was more like I save my writing and everything, and I never throw anything away. And I’ll just take something and read it, and get excited about it again. ‘That’s good, oh God, why did I stop doing that, that was really good.’ So it’s just an attempt to not let it go to waste. To find some way to fit it in.

Reservoir Dogs (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

CS: The only script of yours that I haven’t read is Open Road.

QT: Yeah, no one has read that. I never finished it. That was like the first time I really wrote a script. Roger Avary had written a script called Pandemonium Reigns that was forty pages long and really funny. It’s like these two characters on the road and there’s this hitchhiker and it’s a surreal, wild comedy. Then they get to this kind of crazy, surreal town. Then he ended it in this way that I didn’t like at all. Because I had never finished a script, I had just written scenes, I asked him, ‘Could I take that? Like rewrite it, just do my own version of it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I don’t think he was going to do anything with it—I don’t think he liked his ending either. I started with getting the guy on the road, I wrote forever setting up the thing—now that you bring it up, I had forgotten, but there’s actually a really funny, like violent comedy scene in it that’s really good. I get really annoyed with people saying that I ripped off the Mexican stand-off stuff. Open Road was like way before I even knew who John Woo was. It had a Mexican stand-off scene, True Romance has a Mexican stand-off scene. I wrote that like in 1985 or 1986, way before I had seen A Better Tomorrow or anything. Way, way before. That Mexican stand-off scene is mine as much as it is his. That’s always been in my shit. So I really set-up this big fuckin’ deal to finally get him on the road. But I ultimately found out that I didn’t have a good ending for it either, I saw no way to end it.

CS: Did you incorporate any scenes from that script into your later scripts?

QT: I never really did because The Open Road was just so damn specific—well, I did you know, that's a big lie, cause actually I did do one thing, the character I was going to play—a guy named ‘F. Scarland’ was in my very first draft of Natural Born Killers that most people never read. I later did a complete rewrite on Natural Born Killers but in the first draft, F. Scarland was like the third lead in the piece...

- Method Writing by Erik Bauer. Portions of this interview were previously published in the January/February 1998 issue of Creative Screenwriting. To purchase this issue, visit creativescreenwriting.com