A treasure trove of original stories from “True Romance”! Examining Tarantino's early masterpiece screenplays

Original story 2: Terrence Malick's "Escape from Inferno"

The film that most influenced True Romance was the legendary director Terrence Malick's debut film, The Man from Inferno (1973), a crime road movie based on the 1958 Starkweather-Hugate serial murders.

In the Starkweather-Hugate case, 19-year-old Nebraska teenager Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Karyl Ann Hugate, murdered 11 people, including Hugate's family, before going on the run. Starkweather was sentenced to death and Hugate was given a life sentence (later released). Terrence Malick was inspired by the young couple's reckless crimes and created a poetic, coming-of-age road movie out of this tragic case.

Tarantino lists "Escape from the Inferno " as one of his favorite films, but director Tony Scott also got inspiration for " True Romance " from "Escape from the Inferno ". Particularly notable is the music commissioned from Hans Zimmer, and the theme song "You're So Cool", with its memorable pastoral melody on the marimba, is deliberately made to resemble the educational music "Musica Poetica" by Carl Orff and Gunnild Kethman used in "Escape from the Inferno". Although the composer's name is Zimmer, to be honest, it's not just similar, it's the exact same thing.

The composer Carl Orff is known for his majestic and heroic cantata "Carmina Burana," which is still often used as background music for trailers for historical spectacles. It is a very famous piece that anyone who has heard even a part of it should recognize. On the other hand, "Musica Poetica," used in "Escape from the Inferno," is the polar opposite of "Carmina Burana," which is based on a simple and rustic ensemble. It's no surprise that the composition is simple, as it is a set of etudes that evoke a childishness that Orff and Kethman created to help children learn the joy of playing music.

In "The Hunger Inferno ," Malick wrapped the story of a couple who commits one murder after another in this "musica poetica," portraying the gruesome real-life events as a kind of fantasy created by the couple's subjectivity. Perhaps Scott wanted to borrow the effect that Malick created in " The Inferno Games" to express the purity of Clarence and Alabama in "True True Romance ."

By playing "You're So Cool" many times throughout the film, the innocent and pure side of this runaway couple, who even think that murder and drug dealing are "romantic," comes to the forefront. It's true that they are hiding something dirty, but if you think about it objectively, I want to fully support the "magic of movies and music" that makes these good-for-nothing men and women seem incredibly attractive.

Source #3: "The Night People" by Nicholas Ray (Warning! The following contains spoilers about the ending of the film!)