‘In the Soup’: the independent meta-comedy Quentin Tarantino compared to ‘True Romance’
Undoubtedly, Quentin Tarantino had always wanted to be a movie director. Still, as much as that was his preferred profession, the truth is that he always saw writing films as an equally viable source of income. Before he had taken on his directorial debut, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, he had written the screenplay for True Romance.
While True Romance actually ended up coming out after Reservoir Dogs, it was the his first screenplay for a major picture. Around the same time, Tarantino sold the screenplay for Natural Born Killers to Oliver Stone, although he would later levy an argument against the director, claiming that he had destroyed the story.
Reservoir Dogs was Tarantino’s breakthrough, but it was True Romance that served as the first real signs of his brilliance. After losing interest in directing it, the film was eventually handled by Tony Scott, who signed the likes of Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Christopher Walken up to the ensemble cast.
Narratively, the film tells of a pair of newlyweds who try to evade the mafia after stealing a shipment of cocaine. There’s certainly a uniqueness to True Romance that could only ever come from the mind of Tarantino, but in an interview with fellow filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell, Tarantino said that he found a likeness in Rockwell’s 1992 independent meta-comedy In the Soup.
“The way you designed your script is similar to a script that I wrote called True Romance,” Tarantino had said in Filmmaker. “I designed [it] to have to characters that will take you from the beginning of the movie until the end of the movie but they keep meeting people all along the way. When they meet those people, the movie almost becomes about them.”
In the Soup saw Steve Buscemi play Adolpho Rollo, a struggling and narcissistic screenwriter living in New York City. With the hopes of getting his 500-page screenplay made into a movie, Adolpho puts an advert in a local paper, offering it for just $500 dollars, leading a low-ranking criminal to come in with an offer to produce it.
The film explores the absurd nature of the film industry and the shocking lengths that artists can go to see their projects realised. True Romance is said to be among Quentin Tarantino’s most autobiographical movies. Alexandre Rockwell also admitted that he had “wanted to do a partly autobiographical film” with In the Soup.
“Hopefully at the end of the film, you realize that all those events made the man, made Steve [Buscemi] who he is, I wanted to have all these events happen to him, kind of like a novel,” Rockwell noted. “It really gets under my skin when I hear critics say the film is a shaggy-dog tale that goes off in different directions that never tie up. It’s about events affecting the whole, the arc of the film.”
True Romance set Tarantino on his way to stardom, although it was Reservoir Dogs that would introduce him to an audience for the first time. Arriving in the same year as Tarantino’s directorial debut, In the Soup saw Tarantino’s occasional collaborator Steve Buscemi team up with Alexandre Rockwell to star in a meta-comedy that helped to define the cinematic mood and tone of the 1990s.
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