In 1994, Quentin Tarantino committed cinematic heresy. As Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta—playing Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, two hitmen working for crime boss Marsellus Wallace—drive toward a morning execution in Pulp Fiction, their conversation fixates not on the impending bloodshed but, rather, on peculiar naming conventions of McDonald's menu items in France.

The pair—dressed in matching black suits, en route to retrieve a stolen briefcase for their employer—debate why a quarter pounder becomes a “Royale with Cheese” in Paris, casually dissecting the European metric system while on their way to a hit job in Los Angeles.

While this may have seemed like lazy screenwriting or narrative drift, it wasn’t. It was a deliberate dismantling of cinematic architecture, designed to alter the way dialogue and action coexist on screen.

Jules and Vincent are career criminals who should be discussing strategy, tactics or the grim business ahead. Instead they luxuriate in utterly mundane observations about globalized fast food. The scene establishes them not as one-dimensional thugs, but as fully realized humans who just so happen to kill for a living. They are men with opinions about hamburgers and an appreciation of cultural differences, speaking in the everyday verbal rhythms of colleagues heading to work.

Roger Ebert explicated Tarantino's strategy as having characters “speak at right angles to the action, or depart on flights of fancy.” This was a technique that film scholars would later recognize as revolutionary precisely because it violated every established principle of economical storytelling.

Traditional screenwriting had demanded that dialogue serve the plot, propelling characters from point A to point B with ruthless efficiency. Tarantino subverted this convention, allowing his characters to wallow in the quotidian while, in the case of Pulp Fiction, being surrounded by violence.

Film scholar Robert Kolker called the “apparent witty banality of the dialogue” a carefully constructed “patina over a pastiche,” suggesting Tarantino wasn't being indulgent but was engaging with cinema's DNA while deliberately choosing to ignore it.

The genius lies in recognizing that the creativity of his work involved making distractions and deviations that were compelling for viewers (perhaps the hardest task of his endeavor) which transformed what should have been narrative dead weight into the film's most memorable moments.

By separating dialogue from immediate action, Tarantino flipped the switch on genre archetypes, granting the hitman, pawnshop owner or corrupt boxer an unprecedented dimensionality.

Ebert argued that in lesser films, dialogue is entirely devoted to explaining or furthering the plot, that “no joy is taken in the style of language and idiom for its own sake.”

Tarantino essentially rejected this utilitarian approach. The “Royale with Cheese” confab establishes Jules as a hamburger connoisseur, setting up his later appreciation of the Big Kahuna Burger—the moment that bookends that character's narrative arc. This becomes a detail that feels organic rather than planted because the initial conversation appeared purposeless.

Proliferating the ‘pulpy’

After Pulp Fiction, screenwriters had permission to prioritize character voice and conversational texture over narrative economy. The film demonstrated that audiences would invest time in “irrelevant” dialogue if the writing proved compelling enough. Films could breathe and wander without sacrificing entertainment value.

The technique influenced directors like Guy Ritchie, whose 1998 feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels brought Tarantino's dialogue-heavy style to London's criminal underworld with its quick-fire Cockney slang and interconnected storylines.

Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints and Doug Liman’s Go similarly leaned into hyper-verbal, genre-blending storytelling inspired by Tarantino's conversational rhythms.

Even now, three decades later, the Pulp Fiction model remains a lodestar for understanding how dialogue can work independently from the immediate exigencies of plot.

In Tarantino’s universe of film, conversation is action equally capable of revealing character, building tension and, most importantly, entertaining audiences.