Killing Zoe

Having been overshadowed by former co-worker Quentin Tarantino during the early 1990s, film maker Roger Avary finally established himself with his 2002 adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction (2002). Avary was born on August 23, 1965 in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada, but grew up in Arizona in the United States. After briefly attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Avary drifted to nearby Manhattan Beach, California, and in the 1980s worked as a video store clerk. He became friends with fellow employee Tarantino. The pair often collaborated on stories. The stories eventually became screenplays, and the two often swapped material (which they might have later regretted). Around this time Avary wrote an 80-page script titled “The Open Road.” Although never made it into a film, parts of this script were used for various bits and pieces that added up to classic scenes in future collaborations.

It was not until 1992 that their first film was released, Reservoir Dogs (1992), for which Avary did some background writing. Though initially panned by a some critics (most notably, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel), the film resonated with audiences and won awards due to a level of artistically-penned nihilism not seen on the silver screen at the time. The amount of blood and violence defined Avary and Tarantino’s early careers.

Meanwhile, True Romance (1993), a film written by the pair and originally to be directed by Tarantino, was sold off in order to finance Reservoir Dogs. Unlike with the earlier film, True Romance had a larger portion of the film influenced by Avary’s writing, but he was left uncredited by Tarantino. It was not the first – or last time – this happened. It was in 1994 that the pair really took of career-wise. Avary’s directional debut, Killing Zoe (1993), was released. Dark, sexual, and violent, it won several independent cinema awards. But the film was compared too often to the works of Tarantino (who co-produced it), mostly because it came out around the same time as the pair’s most famous work, Pulp Fiction (1994). The stories in the film – about a boxer, two hitmen, and their boss’ wife – earned the duo an Academy Award for best original screenplay and it won the Palm d’Or (best film) from the Cannes film festival.

After 1994, Avary and Tarantino went their separate ways artistically. They seldom discuss their divergence, though Avary hints that it has to do with how much creative juice they suck from each other. Even though he was now an Oscar winner, Avary spent the tail end of the decade doing mostly script rewrites and polishes. He received a chance to direct once again when Lions Gate Films bought the film rights to the Ellis novel, The Rules of Attraction. Being more faithful to the book than most adaptations, Avary was still able to insert his own style into the film that made critics take note of how different he could actually be from the grimmer Tarantino. The opening of the film even featured an in-joke about Killing Zoe (1993) being “wrongfully considered a Quentin Tarantino film.”

Since then, he has been putting some finishing touches on two film scripts for other directors while working on another adaptation for an Ellis book, Glamorama. —IMDb