6) Pulp Fiction (1993)
20th September, 1993. A diner in Hawthorne, L.A. County, California. A couple are sitting in a booth, heads close together, drinking coffee, smoking, and talking about methods of robbery. To anyone who has been anywhere near any sort of screen at some point during the past 22 years, this looks very much like the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. To Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer however – the only two people in existence who could have the pet names ‘Pumpkin’ and ‘Honey Bunny’ and still look dangerous – this scenario represents one of the most intolerably uncomfortable shoots they had ever endured.
Tarantino had $8.5 million with which to film Pulp Fiction, but his aim was to make it look as though the movie’s budget had been $25 million. Obviously, one of the starting points for any movie wishing to look expensive is its onscreen quality. Fortunately for Tarantino, onscreen picture quality is often actually very achievable on a low budget. The reason for this is to do with the sensitivity of types of film – or, as it’s known in the business, film speed.
A ‘fast film’ is highly sensitive, which basically means that it picks up a lot of light in a very short amount of time. Whereas this requires little light for the shot (and fast films are better for low lit scenes), the fact that each exposure is so short greatly reduces image quality. ‘Slow films’ on the other hand, on which each exposure is much longer, have (to use what is clearly the technical term for this) a much better chance of absorbing every last detail in the scene. The result therefore, from a slow film, is an extremely sharp and detailed picture. This is exactly what Tarantino wanted. For that reason, he opted for the very lowest ASA (American Standards Association) film speed available – which was 50. In short, Tarantino bought a bag of Kodak from the local drugstore, and that is what Pulp Fiction was filmed with. And it looked, to use the wording of the man himself, ‘lustrous. It was the closest thing we had to 1950s Technicolor.’
But, as convenient as slow film was for the director, the same could not be said for the actors. As outlined above, slow films are insensitive to light. This means that in order to capture that intense image quality, a huge amount of additional light is needed. This is fine if you are shooting outdoors in the sun. It is less fine if you are shooting a film in an enclosed and dimly lit diner.
According to Pulp Fiction’s producer, Lawrence Bender, multiple ‘ultra-bright’ electric lamps ‘each like the power of the sun’, were brought in, and set up around the diner. The heat, apparently, was almost unbearable.
But of course, it wasn’t just the beginning of Pulp Fiction that was filmed in the diner. Pulp Fiction is unique on this list for the fact that the opening sequence is also part of the film’s closing scenes: Vincent and Jules, who we meet chronologically earlier than Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (real name Yolanda) are actually also in the diner. This meant further time spent with the lamps on. Eventually, the fierce and unrelenting heat started to crack the glass of the diner’s lights.
It is ironic then that Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules yells the word ‘cool’ over twenty times during his interception of the robbery – and that he declares that the three of them are “gonna be like three little Fonzies here…that’s what we’re gonna be. We’re gonna be cool.”
But Jules is right. The heat in the diner may have been beyond extreme, and the glass may have been shattering around them, but there is no doubt that both of these scenes themselves, and their characters, are infinitely – and effortlessly – cool.
