Production
The title and plot are a play on the titles of romance comic books with their overwrought love stories—very popular in earlier decades—such as "True Life Secrets," "True Stories of Romance," "Romance Tales," "Untamed Love" and "Strange Love."
True Romance was a breakthrough of sorts for Tarantino. Released after Reservoir Dogs, it was his first screenplay for a major motion picture, and Tarantino contends that it is his most autobiographical film to date. He had initially hoped to serve as the film's director, however he ended up losing interest in directing and sold the script. According to Tarantino's audio commentary on the DVD release, he was happy with the way it turned out as, apart from changing the nonlinear narrative he wrote to a more conventional linear structure, it was largely faithful to his original screenplay and, although he initially opposed director Tony Scott's decision to change the ending (which Scott maintained was of his own volition, not the studio's, saying "I just fell in love with these two characters and didn’t want to see them die") he realized when seeing the completed film that Scott's happy ending was more appropriate to the film as he had directed it, whereas the originally scripted ending would have been more suited to Tarantino's directorial style.
The film's score by Hans Zimmer is a theme based on Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's Schulwerk. This theme combined with a voiceover spoken by Arquette is an homage to Terrence Malick's 1973 crime film Badlands, in which Sissy Spacek speaks the voiceover, and that also shares similar dramatic motifs.
Read more about this topic: Clarence Worley
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)