Daily Dialogue — November 16, 2019

Clifford Worley: You’re Sicilian, huh?
Coccotti: Yeah, Sicilian.
Clifford Worley: You know, I read a lot. Especially about things… about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here’s a fact I don’t know whether you know or not. Sicilians were spawned by niggers.
Coccotti: [double takes] Come again?
Clifford Worley: It’s a fact. Yeah. You see, Sicilians have black blood pumpin’ through their hearts. Hey, no, if you don’t believe me, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors are niggers.
Coccotti: Yes…
Clifford Worley: So you see, way back then, Sicilians were like wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but well, then the Moors moved in there, and well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin’ with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That’s why blonde hair and blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know, it’s absolutely amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this…

Coccotti busts out laughing.

Clifford Worley: No, I’m, no, I’m quoting… history. It’s written. It’s a fact, it’s written.
Coccotti: [laughing] I love this guy.
Clifford Worley: Your ancestors are niggers. Uh-huh.

Starts laughing, too.

Clifford Worley: Hey. Yeah. And, and your great-great-great-great grandmother fucked a nigger, ho, ho, yeah, and she had a half-nigger kid… now, if that’s a fact, tell me, am I lying? ’Cause you, you’re part eggplant.

— True Romance (1993), written Quentin Tarrantino

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Interrogation. Today’s suggestion by @MarvellousMarti

Trivia: The genesis of the film began with a fifty page script by Roger Avary titled “The Open Road”. Avary described the plot as being about “an odd couple relationship between an uptight business man and an out-of-control hitchhiker who travel into a Hellish midwestern town together.” When he had trouble finishing it, he asked his friend and fellow Video Archives clerk, Quentin Tarantino, to give it a shot. After several weeks, Quentin handed him over five hundred hand-written pages of, what Avary described as “the Bible of pop culture”. Roger typed and edited the behemoth, working with Quentin on further story ideas. According to a Film Threat article from 1994, the final script was a combination of this movie and Natural Born Killers (1994). Reportedly, it followed Quentin’s original Natural Born Killers script until after the prison riot. After escaping, Mickey and Mallory decide to find and kill the screenwriter who wrote the glitzy Hollywood movie about their exploits. The writer goes on the run, and True Romance was the movie he writes while trying to evade the two psychotic killers. It was told in trademark Tarantino chapter fashion, out of chronological order. When it became obvious that the miniseries-length script would never sell, they split the two stories into separate movies.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Classic Tarantino. Lots of dialogue in a scene where we know what’s inevitably going to happen. The slow build to a violent end.