Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary reveal how taking heroin in Paris inspired ‘Killing Zoe’
Creative inspiration can come from many sources. Books, news articles, relationships – all of these are common fodder for dramatic reimagining. For Quentin Tarantino and his fellow filmmaker and collaborator Roger Avary, however, the inception of one particular project can be traced all the way back to a debaucherous night in Paris in the 1990s.
At the time, Tarantino and Avary were young Hollywood upstarts on the cusp of stardom. Avary would help Tarantino write Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and went on to direct the dark teen comedy The Rules of Attraction in the early 2000s.
While visiting the French capital to scout locations for Reservoir Dogs in the early ‘90s, Avary bumped into a friend from Los Angeles who told him he’d show him “the real Paris.” Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience this week, Avary and Tarantino recounted the story.
“He drove me through Paris, and next thing I know, he’s doing heroin,” Avary said of his French friend. “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.’”
Throughout the hectic evening that followed, Avary jotted notes, capturing dialogue and recording his surroundings. When he got home from his trip to Europe, he told Tarantino about the night, and from there, he began constructing a screenplay for the film that would eventually be called Killing Zoe.
Starring Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy, the story centres on a safe-cracker who comes to Paris to help an old friend with a bank heist. Though largely unsuccessful when it was released, its highly stylised violence and winning central performances show clear parallels to Tarantino’s later work.
According to Avary, much of the dialogue and characterisations in the film were straight out of his whirlwind night out in Paris. The robbery angle was just a way for him to showcase his experiences. “[I]t just became a movie about a guy going some place and everything he thought he knew was wrong,” he explained. “You haven’t seen your friend in a while, you go see him, it’s all about that friendship and that misconception.”
A year after Killing Zoe was released, Avary and Tarantino reached the highest of heights with the release of Pulp Fiction. They went on to win Oscars for co-writing the film, and while it remains Avary’s most celebrated work, Killing Zoe has grown a passionate cult fan base over the years.
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