Sally Menke: The woman who made Quentin Tarantino tick
There’s no way that cinema fans would mention the name Quentin Tarantino and claim that he does not fully deserve the high stature he has achieved over the last three decades. With several quality films under his belt, Tarantino has established himself as one of Hollywood’s big-player movie directors.
But for all the acclaim Tarantino has rightfully earned during his stellar career in the movie business, few figures are as crucial to his undoubted success as the film editor Sally Menke. Menke was tasked with editing Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, and edited each of his other works until her tragic death in 2010.
All in all, Menke worked on eight of Tarantino’s movies, including many of his best. She wove together the merging narratives of Pulp Fiction, brought to life the exploitation homage in Jackie Brown and sewed and stitched the impressive martial arts cuts of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
Menke herself had admitted that she and Tarantino just seemed to click from the beginning. Tarantino had been looking for an editor for his debut – “a cheap one”, according to a piece Menke wrote in The Observer – and after Menke read the Reservoir Dogs script and thought it was “amazing”, she discovered she had got the job halfway up a mountain in Banff, Canada, letting out a scream of excitement “that echoed around the mountain”.
Martin Scorsese had also used a female editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, for much of his career, and this was something that both Menke and Tarantino were aware of. Scorsese had been “a hero” of Menke’s, and the Reservoir Dogs script had the same tone as many of Scorsese’s best crime drama works, so she was naturally excited to get to work.
Tarantino had spoken of the importance of the director-editor relationship, once declaring, “The best collaborations are the director-editor teams, where they can finish each other’s sentences.” He went on, during an interview with Variety, to name Menke as his “only, truly genuine collaborator”.
In an interview released on the Grindhouse DVD, Tarantino again spoke of Menke, noting how important she was to his creative process. “I write by myself, but when it comes to the editing, I write with Sally,” he said. “It’s the true epitome, I guess, of a collaboration because I don’t remember what her idea was, what was my idea. We’re just right there together.”
“We just clicked creatively,” Menke had also noted. “It’s a rare, intense sort of a relationship, and if it ain’t broke, you wouldn’t want to fix it. We’ve built up such trust that now he gives me the dailies, and I put ’em together, and there’s little interference.”
Of all the moments spent working on Tarantino’s movies, it looks as though editing John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing to Chuck Berry in Pulp Fiction was her favourite. The scene was filmed to playback, which made it an easy cut, but Menke admitted that the whole thing was “glorious”, with “a momentum of its own and an obvious magic”.
Menke sadly passed away in 2010 after she went hiking in the Hollywood Hills in extreme heat with a friend and her dog. After she failed to return home, several Los Angeles police detectives went looking for her and found her body at the bottom of a ravine. The cause of death was said to have been relative to the 113 °F / 45 °C heat in Los Angeles that day.
The film editor had also offered her services to Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses and the 2010 film Peacock, which was her final work. But she’ll always be remembered for bringing together some of Quentin Tarantino’s best-ever movies and being the woman that made him creatively tick.
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