2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

High-Level Overview

Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, who met as clerks at the Video Archives rental store in Manhattan Beach and went on to share an Oscar for Pulp Fiction, join Joe Rogan to promote the second season of their movie podcast, The Video Archives Podcast. Over roughly three hours, the three talk about how a small video store shaped two filmmakers, the moment each of them decided to stop dreaming and start doing, the craft of writing, why most prestige TV fades from memory while great movies stay with you, and why the two friends' unfiltered way of talking about film works as a podcast. Along the way come LA wildfires, 1980s cocaine culture, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, AI video tools, and a debate about evil.

The tone is playful and bickering, like an old married couple, as Rogan jokes, with Tarantino passionate and precise and Avary prone to long, winding stories. The mood deepens considerably when Avary speaks openly about the car crash that killed his passenger, his time in jail, and how it changed the way he sees the world. The conversation swings between film-nerd deep dives, career advice, comic banter and an unexpectedly moving personal reckoning.

The Discussion Explores:

• Life at Video Archives: how a mom-and-pop video store worked, why it died, and why the clerks were "the algorithm"
• The turning points that pushed Tarantino and Avary from clerks to working filmmakers
• Avary's Killing Zoe: genre as a foundation, a Paris heroin night, and a shot born from a budget crisis
• Writing by hand versus on a laptop, and how comedy writing differs from screenwriting
• Why most modern TV is compelling in the moment but forgettable, compared with a great movie
• The Video Archives Podcast: VHS tapes, honest arguments, and building a community like the old store
• Films they defend, 80s cocaine culture, Kubrick's influence, and the Eyes Wide Shut mystery
• Avary's crash, incarceration, writing in solitary, and the gratitude and compassion that followed

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Warm-Up: Assassins, Fires and Insurance

The conversation starts mid-story, with Avary describing former special-operations contacts he got to know through a billionaire friend. One of them told him that injecting coffee into someone's bloodstream could cause a heart attack that looks like nothing more than caffeine at autopsy. Rogan brings up the recent killing of a health insurance CEO and guesses the shooter was someone who felt wronged rather than a professional. That leads to a shared disgust with insurance, especially in California, where Avary says his home near open space has become uninsurable because of fire risk.

Rogan recalls being evacuated three times from Bell Canyon and a firefighter telling him that one day a fire would hit LA with the wrong wind and burn "right through to the ocean." Avary argues fire is a natural process and that building homes into fire-prone land creates superstorms of fire. Tarantino recalls the 1993 Malibu fire breaking out during the Pulp Fiction shoot, when the crew set up a TV so Bruce Willis could watch whether his house survived, even as news reports claimed he was on his roof with a hose.

Video Archives: The Store That Made Them

Tarantino explains why video stores looked like a good small business: once a tape paid for itself, every rental was profit. What killed the mom-and-pop stores was that new titles arrive every month and shelf space runs out within a few years. Then chains like Blockbuster could buy 50 copies of a hit while a small store could afford a dozen Top Guns. Blockbuster even bought the Shakey's Pizza in Video Archives' own shopping center, and still couldn't put them out of business. Because they couldn't stock every hit, the clerks had to sell customers on other films, and regulars came in every other day to talk movies for 40 minutes at a time. As Avary puts it, "We're the algorithm."

Tarantino says he became the neighborhood's film critic, learning each customer's taste well enough to hand a housewife something she'd love rather than his favorite gonzo violence. The clerks became local celebrities ("the video guys), which he says gave him a small taste of fame long before the real thing. He admits the job was dream adjacent": watching and talking about movies all day was close enough to his dream that for a few years it put his ambition to sleep.

From Clerks to Filmmakers

Tarantino's wake-up call came from an older roommate, Steve-O, who turned 30 and grew bitter. He ranted that he had spent his twenties in minimum-wage jobs at record stores and pizza places, each time with a crew of friends just like Tarantino's, and that they all eventually go away. At 25, Tarantino saw his own future. He describes all-night sessions where he refused to make excuses for himself, and one ended with a decision: move toward Hollywood (he could only afford Koreatown), get around people actually making movies, and take temp work if needed. Within about a year and a half he was earning a living from rewrites, a few thousand dollars at a time, compared with roughly $10,000 a year through his twenties. Rogan connects this to comedy, saying you have to be where the scene is. He explains that he built the Comedy Mothership in Austin as a hub where new comics have open mics, a talent coordinator and access to top comedians, and says it takes about ten years to become a real headliner.

Avary, meanwhile, was already shooting Super 8 horror films with punk friends. His career advice came from a Video Archives customer, John Langley, who created Cops. It started as a pitch called "the real Miami Vice and took off during a writers' strike. When Avary, then a production assistant, asked how to work his way up, Langley told him to just call himself a director: start at the top it's the best way to go. Avary quit on the spot and admits I was a poser I was faking it until I made it," but says that telling people what he was eventually made it true. Tarantino tells a touching story of the Langleys raising a glass at a dinner party when they heard he had actually gotten Reservoir Dogs made.

Genre as a Foundation: The Making of Killing Zoe

Both men describe a shared strategy from their early days: make an art film on top of a genre foundation. Avary points to Blood Simple as the model, and says Kubrick made genre films in every category, from science fiction to horror to costume drama. He wanted to "keep one foot in exploitation" while elevating the material. Killing Zoe began when producer Lawrence Bender found a cheap bank location while scouting Reservoir Dogs and asked if anyone had a bank script; Avary said yes and then wrote one. He built it around a real night in Paris when a French acquaintance showed him "the real Paris" and had Avary hold his arm while he shot heroin, turning the bank robbery into a story about a man who discovers everything he thought he knew is wrong.

Avary compares raising a film to raising a child: you protect it but let it grow into what it wants to be. He recounts how the bond company forced him to cut an expensive sewer scene, so he replaced it with a single wide-lens shot of Jean-Hugues Anglade walking into a close-up as everything dawns on him. Tarantino, who calls it an exhilarating scene that "boils down to an actor's face," teases him for explaining how the sausage was made rather than why it works. Avary also recalls horror makeup legend Tom Savini flying himself out for almost no money and making realistic burn effects from Vaseline, paint and tissue paper. Tarantino says he threatened to take his name off the film if executives cut the burned-guard scene, observing that the director and actors are the only ones not operating out of fear.

Why Maverick Voices Win the Room

Tarantino offers a theory about their early edge in Hollywood meetings. Executives don't rise by doubling down on their own opinions; they read the room and build consensus, and he concedes that the development process often improves bad scripts. Film geeks, by contrast, have little to show for years of devotion except a sharply defined opinion. In Hollywood, he says, "He who has the strongest point of view in the room wins." Studios hire mavericks because they're a little scary, then, like a girlfriend, try to change them; the challenge is to stay the person who walked in. Tarantino also relays an executive who tried directing and realized the difference: a real director "sees the movie" in his head. Rogan compares this to Dave Chappelle, who walked away from a reported $50 million deal rather than be changed.

Avary says that when he first broke through he felt like "a reporter deep undercover" on the other side of the line. Rogan says that outsider sensibility is exactly why their films took risks.

Writing by Hand, Writing by Laptop

Avary says jail reconnected him with writing by hand after years of composing on a laptop. Handwriting slows you down so you think more and branch in more directions, and he calls the pen "the antenna to God. His process is to vomit out an overwritten handwritten draft, then tame it at the keyboard. He argues you can't write poetry on a computer" because the rhythm lives in the connection between hand and paper. Rogan, by contrast, writes comedy on a laptop (he likes ThinkPads for their key travel), writing 1,500-word essays on a topic just to mine one usable line, which he compares to strip mining. Tarantino notes the difference in purpose: screenplays have to hold up as writing on the page, while stand-up only truly takes shape in front of an audience.

Movies Versus Prestige Television

Tarantino makes a detailed case that even very good modern TV is, underneath, a soap opera. He enjoyed Yellowstone and 1883 and was compelled to keep watching, "But at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera": he can barely remember any villain after the first season, while Red River stays with him for life. A great movie builds to an emotional climax and pays off; serialized TV mostly delivers interpersonal drama. His counterexample is the first season of Homeland, whose finale, with Brody in a suicide vest taking a call from his unknowing daughter, works like a movie. He argues Deadwood was essentially a Wild Bill movie spread over six to eight episodes, and contrasts today's serials with standalone episodes of Bonanza featuring guest stars like Charles Bronson.

Avary adds that meaningless violence has gone too far, citing Game of Thrones, which he felt made viewers love characters only to kill them. Rogan pushes back that brutal deaths would be realistic in that world. They also discuss why movies can show heads exploding but not sex, recalling the 1970s porno-chic moment around Deep Throat, when people hoped couples would go to erotic films as a date night.

The Video Archives Podcast and the Ghost of Siskel and Ebert

The two reconnected during the pandemic after a long falling-out, which Avary calls business-related and attributes to his own immaturity as a young "SoCal Gen X punk filmmaker" unprepared for agents, money and the press. They began watching movies together again and turned it into a show. Each episode covers three films, watched together on the actual VHS tapes from the store, often in pan-and-scan. They describe a special episode with Eli Roth on American giallo-style thrillers where they almost skipped Dressed to Kill because they'd seen it so many times, and it became one of the best viewings of their lives. Tarantino told Avary that if they do it right, in a few years they could be considered like Siskel and Ebert. Rogan agrees the show works because the friendship is real and no one is producing it.

After a first season with SiriusXM that Tarantino says drew about two million listeners, they moved to Patreon: a free 40-minute version, with full episodes at $5 and a bonus show at $8. Avary jokes about reading ads in a 1970s DJ voice after fans said he'd sell "sour milk from a sick cow." Tarantino wants at least one hard-to-find film each episode so the community has to hunt for it, and Avary's daughter Gala, a producer, demonstrates how to track them down. Fans describe it as "a $5 film school. Tarantino is blunt about other movie podcasts: sincere hosts whose film knowledge is abysmal and who lack context for films released before they were born, whereas he and Avary fact-check and re-record. Avary cites Pauline Kael's rule: You have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing." Tarantino also runs a 20-seat micro-cinema at his Vista theater showing VHS and 16mm, where a silent Beau Geste left the audience in stunned emotional silence.

Films Worth Defending, and the Cocaine Decade

Avary defends Joker: Folie a Deux and describes being called an asshole across a wave of copycat articles just for saying he liked it, which leads to a discussion of how social media removes the check of reasonable people around you. Tarantino says he used to champion critically hated films and pushed Ishtar on customers. He argues it's a funny movie ruined by stories about its budget, and that with cheaper stars it would have been seen for what it is. He defends Showgirls as a straight-to-video exploitation movie given a $60 million budget and Paul Verhoeven, and recalls a producer admitting it was really about them doing a lot of cocaine.

That opens stories about 1980s cocaine, including a dealer customer nicknamed Tuttle who dropped baseball-sized rocks on the store counter and once brought a live hand grenade to a party. Both say their crew went a bit nuts for a few months and then pulled back, having seen others let it take over. Avary says having children ended it for him. The conversation turns to evil and demons: Rogan argues demonic behavior is real whether or not demons are, and Tarantino recounts Kurtz's speech from Apocalypse Now. Avary describes helping John Milius, the film's writer, turn his Genghis Khan script into a series after Milius's stroke, and reflects on how strong men both conquer and hold civilizations together. Rogan argues that social media is making people more tribal and less able to disagree and still share a dinner.

Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut and AI

Avary names Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman and Roman Polanski as his cinematic "parents," and traces Kubrick's lineage back to Fritz Lang's M, which he calls the essential film for learning sound because every shot is built around it. He believes Eyes Wide Shut was altered after Kubrick's death. Rereading an original script, he says it was meant to have a third-person narration, and he sees a buried thread of two men in the background who, in the final toy-store scene, walk off with the couple's daughter. He relays a second-hand story of Kubrick shouting at executives not to cut his film days before he died, and says he'd love to finish it.

That leads to AI. Avary has been experimenting with Runway, whose tools he says improve almost weekly, and has made a claymation version of himself and Tarantino without telling him. He says he's thought about repainting his motion-capture film Beowulf with AI. Tarantino admits he prefers tactile filmmaking. Avary recounts how he planned to make Beowulf cheaply in Iceland, then producer Steve Bing kept raising his offer until Avary named an absurd price just to discourage him. Bing accepted, and Avary, broke at the time, went home and cried: "nothing drives tears like money." He praises Robert Zemeckis as an inventive genius who welcomed him and co-writer Neil Gaiman into the process, but says the sale left him wondering who he was.

The Crash, Jail and a Changed Life

Avary tells the story he had alluded to earlier. Driving home fast from a dinner, he lost control (he thinks a tire blew), steered away from a rocky ditch and hit a telephone pole. His passenger was killed and his wife was thrown from the car. He describes kneeling beside her on the asphalt, begging for her life, and feeling it come back into her. He was convicted of manslaughter in a DUI-related case, and says everything he'd built vanished: money, career, calls. He watched the Academy Awards from a jail tank as Tarantino won for Django Unchained. He now avoids even being seen holding a drink, and has become a vegetarian, partly because of a pet pig whose eyes looked human.

In a low-security facility he tweeted about daily jail life, and Roger Ebert amplified it worldwide. He describes solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day and no sense of time, which he says broke him after two days. He also recalls guards confiscating his writing as a security threat, and his workaround of sealing pages in privileged letters to his attorney, which his daughter then typed up. Inmates asked him to write love letters, and adapting an old Robin Hood novel from the book cart moved him to tears that still mark the pages. He credits Video Archives customers John and Maggie Langley for lending him money and giving him his first job after release.

Avary says he would give anything to reverse what happened, but that he had been sleepwalking through life and the experience opened his "third eye. A tree, a cloud, or petting a cat now feel like gifts, and he reminds listeners that we live in bodies of glass." His biggest lesson: "be compassionate to other people because you might not know it but they might be going through shit in their lives." He says his cynicism about filmmaking evaporated, and he now knows exactly what he has to say as a filmmaker.

Conclusion

This episode is part love letter to the video-store era and part master class in how two self-taught filmmakers found their voices: build on genre, hold the strongest point of view in the room, get close to the people actually doing the work, and don't let a comfortable, "dream adjacent" job put your ambition to sleep. Tarantino's case that great movies outlast even excellent TV, and the pair's defense of honest, context-rich film talk, explain why their VHS-based podcast feels like the old store reborn. The emotional center is Avary's account of the fatal crash, prison and the gratitude and compassion he carried out of it, which turns a fun film conversation into something more lasting. Movie lovers, aspiring writers and anyone who needs a reminder about second chances will find the full episode worth their time.

This is a summary of "2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.