Almost every filmmaker has at least one or two ideas that never made it into development. With someone like Quentin Tarantino—a well-known cinephile who is incredibly specific in all things—those abandoned ideas can be particularly fascinating, as is the case with his unmade Pulp Fiction prequel. In the almost-25 years since his cult classic hit theaters, Tarantino has occasionally spoken about Double V Vega, which would have centered on Vic and Vincent Vega—the characters played by Michael Madsen and John Travolta in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In a new interview with CinemaBlend, Tarantino revisited the idea, which he says never made it past the premise stage, though he did offer some new details:
I don’t think I took it far enough for a story, but I had a premise. It would have taken place in Amsterdam. So it would have taken place in the time that Vincent was in Amsterdam. Remember in Pulp Fiction, he had just come back from Amsterdam and he was telling the whole story. He was running some club for Marcellus. And so, he was probably there for a couple of years. At some point, in his two-year stay in Amsterdam, running some club, Vic shows up to visit him. And it would have been their weekend. Exactly what happens to them or what trouble they get into, I never took it that far.
Unlike some of Tarantino’s other abandoned ideas—like Killer Crow, or an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 40 Lashes Less One—the Vega brothers movie had a “shelf life.” It’s not a movie he could make now, given how much Travolta and Madsen have aged, and Tarantino made it clear that he’s (unsurprisingly) not interested in utilizing de-aging visual effects in his work.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Tarantino’s ninth film (kind of?), hits theaters this weekend.