Quentin Tarantino is renowned as one of the world’s best writers of dialogue, and just like fellow screenwriters who have been praised for their dialogue — Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet, et al. — a large reason for this is Tarantino’s ability to write engaging conversations. (That’s actually what dialogue means — conversations shared by two or more people — but since it’s become a catch-all term for spoken words in movies, the distinction needs to be made.)
Tarantino has said that he lets his characters speak through his pen. This way, not only do they develop an identity of their own, they bounce that identity off of other characters’ identities, and reveal parts of themselves through conversation. So, here are 10 Unforgettable Conversations From Quentin Tarantino Movies, Ranked.
Royale with Cheese (Pulp Fiction)
Near the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Jules and Vincent are driving to Brett’s apartment for a job. On the way, they talk about Vincent’s recent trip to Amsterdam, discussing the drug laws over there and what they call certain fast foods. It’s just a normal conversation that any two people could have — those two people just happen to be mob hitmen. Reportedly, Jerry Seinfeld felt that this dialogue was influenced by Jerry and George’s banter in Seinfeld: “I think Pulp Fiction was definitely influenced by [Seinfeld]. When Larry [David] and I saw that scene about the Big Mac, he went, ‘Hey, that’s our stuff!’”
Who Am I? (Inglourious Basterds)
Midway through Inglourious Basterds, we’re introduced to a bunch of new characters, including a British spy played by Michael Fassbender and a German movie star played by Diane Kruger, and then put in an underground bar with them. They play the “Who Am I?” card game for about 20 minutes of the movie, which could’ve easily gotten boring. But since we know which characters are actually German and which characters are pretending to be German – not to mention, they’re all stuck underground – we’re waiting for everything to go horribly wrong, so it’s a tense 20 minutes. And by the time everything does go horribly wrong, we’ve let our guards down, so it’s even more impactful.
The opening diner scene (Reservoir Dogs)
Quentin Tarantino reportedly added the opening diner scene to Reservoir Dogs to give Edward Bunker (a.k.a. Mr. Blue) some lines. Ironically, it was the scene that Bunker, a real-life retired career criminal, would condemned the script for ruining the realism of the story. (He wouldn’t eat breakfast in a public place with his whole crew in distinctive clothing before a job, because witnesses would undoubtedly remember them.)
It immediately establishes the tone of the film — and the tone of Tarantino’s career, which was just beginning on the festival circuit in 1992 — by giving us a table filled with typical genre characters (gangsters in black suits, a type that you only ever see in movies) who talk about pop culture. If these genre archetypes were real, they would discuss the same topics we discuss. The example, in this case, is the unclear meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
The Bride kills Bill (Kill Bill: Volume 2)
The brutal, action-packed martial arts epic Kill Bill — which Quentin Tarantino considers to be one film, despite being released in two parts — isn’t the director’s finest film — it’s a little rough around the edges — but it just might be the pinnacle of his imagination. It’s the movie where all of Tarantino’s influences converged in such a unique way that his idiosyncratic style shines through the homages.
At the end of Volume 2, after all the death and destruction that paved the way for the climactic showdown, Bill’s death is surprisingly quiet. The Bride blows up Bill’s heart in his chest, and then they sit and converse before Bill walks off to quietly die.
Marquis tells the General what happened to his son (The Hateful Eight)
When Quentin Tarantino was writing The Hateful Eight, he didn’t know all the secrets that each character was holding onto. He knew as much about the characters going into the first draft as they knew about each other. Instead of mapping out the story from the beginning, Tarantino let the characters slowly reveal their secrets to him. It’s a unique way to write a mystery, but in this case, it was undeniably effective.
Arguably the most well-crafted dialogue scene in the movie is when Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) tells General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern) the shocking story of what he did to his son. It distracts from the coffee getting poisoned and slowly builds the tension to its boiling point.
Pumpkin and Honey Bunny discuss robbing a diner (Pulp Fiction)
The opening scene of Pulp Fiction stars two characters whose importance remains unclear until the final scene. Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) sit in a diner, having some coffee, discussing their career as a pair of armed robbers. Pumpkin wonders why more people don’t rob restaurants and diners, because banks have boosted security and liquor store cashiers might have a shotgun behind the counter, but diner staff aren’t expecting it, and they aren’t getting paid enough to care about protecting the business. At the end of the conversation, they express their love for each other and promptly stick up the diner.
Jackie and Max listen to a Delfonics record (Jackie Brown)
In the Elmore Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown, perhaps Quentin Tarantino’s most underrated film, the title character (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (the late, great Robert Forster) develop a more human and subtle relationship than most of the couples in the Tarantino oeuvre. The scene that creates a real connection between them sees Max coming over to Jackie’s house to pick up the gun she swiped from his car to threaten Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) with. They have a cup of coffee and listen to the Delfonics’ record “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” as they get to know one another.
The dinner at Candyland (Django Unchained)
Everything seems to be going well for Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), as they’ve fooled Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) into believing they are who they say they are, and they’ve made a deal to buy Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).
However, Candie’s trusted confidante Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) notices the way Django and Broomhilda are looking at each other and catches on that they know each other. He brings this to Candie’s attention and the scene suddenly takes a very sinister turn. The scene got so intense that DiCaprio cut his hand when he hammered the skull and kept going with the scene.
The Sicilian scene (True Romance)
Technically, True Romance isn’t a Quentin Tarantino movie, since he sold the script to a producer and Tony Scott was brought on to direct it. But it feels like a Tarantino movie, due to his distinctive dialogue style. The scene in which Christopher Walken interrogates Dennis Hopper, and Hopper teases Walken about his Sicilian heritage, is brilliantly written and beautifully handled by two actors at the height of their powers.
True Romance was Tarantino’s first script, and he was so proud of the Sicilian scene that he used it as the benchmark for his dialogue scenes, trying to top it in his mind as his best dialogue scene for the rest of his career, eventually doing so with the opening scene from Inglourious Basterds.
Col. Landa interviews LaPadite (Inglourious Basterds)
Quentin Tarantino has named this as his favorite scene he’s written. Inglourious Basterds opens with S.S. Colonel Hans Landa arriving on a French dairy farm and interviewing LaPadite, the dairy farmer, about Jewish families in the area. In this scene, Tarantino utilized the Hitchcockian suspense-building technique of the “bomb under the table,” the bomb in the case being a dozen or so Jewish refugees hiding underneath the floorboards. The scene is about eight minutes of polite conversation, but it’s made unbearably tense by giving the audience the information that LaPadite desperately wants to hide from Landa, who may or may not be onto him.
