Samuel L. Jackson has revealed Pulp Fiction nearly had a much more violent ending.
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 movie concludes after gangster Jules (Jackson) manages to convince Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) to peacefully end their diner robbery by reciting the fictionalized Bible passage Ezekiel 25:17 at them. However, the actor has now shared the flick almost ended with a more grizzly sequence.
“In Pulp Fiction, in the original script, in the diner — when Tim first comes over and he asks about the briefcase, he opens it up. And when he opens it, I shoot Honey Bunny off the bar. And I shoot his a– and kill him,” Jackson admitted in GQ’s “Most Iconic Characters” video series, in which Jackson reflected on his Hollywood career.
“They do a cut … I open my eyes, and it’s what I would’ve done before I got the vision in the house of ‘don’t kill anybody.’ He’s still standing there. So that’s not there,” he continued.
While Jackson liked the sound of the original ending to the film, he previously insisted his favorite movie moment of all time was the diner scene from the released movie, where his character chooses to put his past as a contract killer behind him in a quest to find redemption, all while his associate Vincent Vega (John Travolta) watches in amazement.
“Everybody loved the killing ones, but the diner scene [is the best], just because there’s so much going on when John and I are sitting there having that conversation prior to what happened … The bullets [are] not killing us, and he’s making this decision about walking the earth just to see what’s going on,” he told GQ.
The Django Unchained star added that at that point in the picture, the speech became “the biggest threat you’ve ever heard.”
“So by the time Tim gets there and I have an opportunity to do that speech again — the same speech that I’ve been killing people with and make it make sense in a whole ‘nother kind of way — … it’s just the biggest threat you’ve ever heard in your life. And the next, the dude’s like sitting there making a revelation about who he is and where his place is in the world, and who he actually is,” Jackson recalled.
“He said, ‘I’d love to be the shepherd, and that would be great,’ ” Jackson stated. “They said that they didn’t know how the movie was supposed to end until I did that scene. But they had no idea that that’s what all that s— meant until I did it.”
