Roger Avary: The Man Who Showed Up on Joe Rogan’s Podcast Alongside Quentin Tarantino – Who is He?

Roger Avary might just be one of the least well-known Oscar-winning screenwriters in the last three decades, especially when you consider the movie he won the award for. Back in the beginning of 1995, Avary received an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his contribution to the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. He shares this credit with his friend and former colleague from their days working together in a video store, the acclaimed writer-director Quentin Tarantino.

Typically, the Oscar for Original Screenplay either greatly expands a blossoming filmmaker’s career reach and prestige (as was the case with Christopher McQuarrie, Sofia Coppola, Diablo Cody, Emerald Fennell, and Jordan Peele) or serves as a coronation of sorts for more established writer-directors who might not have a Best Director award in their immediate future (Cameron Crowe, the Coen Brothers, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze). Tarantino has arguably received writing Oscars for both of those designations, having won for Pulp as well as Django Unchained later in his career. Avary, then, has had the rare experience of being upstaged by the person he won with. After winning an Oscar for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino went on to make a series of hits and award winners. Avary, well, he does a podcast with Tarantino sometimes.

Though that might sound dismissive of Avary’s work on his own, the Video Archives podcast he does with his friend and former coworker Tarantino is probably how most cinephiles under 30 know him; well, that and the duo’s recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, where the two promoted their pod (and Avary dished some conspiracy theories about Stanley Kubrick’s death and Eyes Wide Shut). But Avary does have a solo career: He wrote and directed the crime picture Killing Zoe shortly before Pulp Fiction came out, putting him on similar footing as Tarantino, who only had Reservoir Dogs to his name as a director pre-Pulp (though he also had screenwriting credits on True Romance and Natural Born Killers). Killing Zoe has its fans, but it’s a very ’90s heist story, featuring a lot of violence, a male fantasy of a sex worker as the female lead (the titular Zoe, played by Julie Delpy), and Eric Stoltz. Like Tarantino, Avary followed Pulp Fiction with a less well-known project, and unlikely Tarantino, he had the good sense not to co-star in it: Mr. Stitch, a cable-movie Frankenstein riff.

Various Avary-related projects failed to get off the ground in the years following his Oscar, leading to a gap similar to Tarantino’s long hiatuses between proper directorial efforts after becoming a household name (though he did make Jackie Brown in 1997). Avary returned in 2002 with probably his most-seen movie as a director, the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Rules of Attraction, starring a variety of young talent including James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Iam Somderhalder, Jessica Biel, Kate Bosworth, and Kip Pardue. The movie has some bold stylistic gambits, including a dizzying sequence depicting Pardue’s character semester abroad that inspired an entire improvised and unreleased spinoff movie, but much of it is as shrill and in-your-face as Killing Zoe, lacking the satirical finesse of American Psycho (to which is tangentially connected). Later in the 2000s, Avary had screenwriting credits on a couple of genre-y movies: the 2006 video game adaptation Silent Hill and the 2007 Old English adaptation Beowulf.

But a pivotal moment in Avary’s life came later that decade, when he was arrested for and eventually convicted of manslaughter, in the matter of a January 2008 DUI car accident that killed his passenger and injured his wife. (He served a year in prison starting in 2009.)

His next project was 2019’s little-seen Lucky Day, a sort-of sequel to Killing Zoe (with similar characters but different names and actors) that he wrote while imprisoned. He and Tarantino premiered their Video Archives podcast a few years later, in 2022 – which marked a major reunion between Tarantino and Avary, after falling out over the Pulp credits, which Avary felt downplayed his contributions to the script.

Indeed, Avary has become one of those fan-beloved “secret sauce” guys of legend over the years – the creative partner who certain viewers can insist was the real reason some particular movie hit better for them than the later stuff. Owen Wilson fulfills that role for Wes Anderson; despite the fact that Anderson has worked with a variety of co-writers, and that Wilson has appeared in the vast majority of his movies (suggesting an ongoing compatibility), there are certainly those who insist that nothing was the same for Anderson after Wilson was no longer a credited co-writer, as he was on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. Similarly, Avary’s name on the Pulp Fiction screenplay is an easy way to explain why, 30 years later, it remains Tarantino’s funniest, most adrenalized, and most overall beloved film.

These explanations hardly ever do justice to the filmmakers at hand – neither the director who “hasn’t been the same,” nor the supposed secret-sauce cowriter who is reduced to an ingredient in someone else’s cookbook. Even if you love Killing Zoe or Rules of Attraction, it’s a peculiar exercise to watch those movies and think: Ah ha, this is precisely what Inglourious Basterds lacks! For better or worse, Roger Avary is his own deal. Pulp Fiction wouldn’t exist in precisely the same way without him, and his own movies likely wouldn’t exist in precisely the same way without Tarantino. That’s the weird and wonderful nature of the movies.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.