Killing Zoe is a 1993 thriller written and directed by Roger Avary. It was first screened at a couple of European festivals (MIFED, Raindance) in October 1993, then at Sundance in January 1994, and finally released in theatres in August 1994. It came out on DVD in August 2001.
SYNOPSIS:
Zed has only just arrived in the beautiful Paris and already he’s up to no good. Having just slept with a call girl, he spends a night on the town with his dangerous friends. They all decide to rob a bank the following day. There’s only one problem: Zed’s call-girl, Zoe, just happens to work at the bank which is to be robbed!
CAST:
Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Eric Pascal Chaltiel, Gary Kemp, Salvator Xuereb, Bruce Ramsay, Tai Thai
From a 1994 interview with Roger Avary:
The film is loosely based on a trip Avary took to Paris a few years ago. He had run into an old friend who took him on a tour of the city. Soon Avary found himself watching his companion shoot up heroin. “I never did heroin that night, but I took detailed notes,” he said.
“When I got back (to the States), I told Quentin (Tarantino) the entire story of my trip, which was this big long opus. It didn’t just have the Paris sequence. It had stuff that happened in England, Greece, Italy and Spain – all sorts of stuff that happened to me. But this was like one of the more intense moments, because this was a person that I knew. And it was just so backwards from what I had thought reality was.
“Quentin was like, ‘Aw man. You’ve gotta turn it into a film. You gotta call it Roger Takes a Trip. That’s the name of the movie.’ And he kept telling me that over and over.
“And then one day, Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs) called me up on the phone and said, ‘Roger, listen. I found this bank (in Paris), And it’s this awesome location where we were scouting for Reservoir Dogs. We have no use for it at all. But if you have a script that takes place in a bank we can kick together $100,000 or $200,000 and make a movie there.’
“And I said, ‘Lawrence, this is your lucky day. I have a script that takes place in a bank.’ And I sat down and began to write Roger Takes a Trip, knowing that I would eventually get to the bank. I drew on that vacation. — source
DVD ON AMAZON: Killing Zoe, Killing Zoe Unrated DVD
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