True Romance - Production

Production

The title and plot are a play on the titles of romance comic books with their overwrought love stories—very popular in earlier decades—such as "True Life Secrets," "True Stories of Romance," "Romance Tales," "Untamed Love" and "Strange Love."

True Romance was a breakthrough of sorts for Tarantino. Released after Reservoir Dogs, it was his first screenplay for a major motion picture, and Tarantino contends that it is his most autobiographical film to date. He had initially hoped to serve as the film's director, however he ended up losing interest in directing and sold the script. According to Tarantino's audio commentary on the DVD release, he was happy with the way it turned out as, apart from changing the nonlinear narrative he wrote to a more conventional linear structure, it was largely faithful to his original screenplay and, although he initially opposed director Tony Scott's decision to change the ending (which Scott maintained was of his own volition, not the studio's, saying "I just fell in love with these two characters and didn’t want to see them die") he realized when seeing the completed film that Scott's happy ending was more appropriate to the film as he had directed it, whereas the originally scripted ending would have been more suited to Tarantino's directorial style.

The film's score by Hans Zimmer is a theme based on Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's Schulwerk. This theme combined with a voiceover spoken by Arquette is an homage to Terrence Malick's 1973 crime film Badlands, in which Sissy Spacek speaks the voiceover, and that also shares similar dramatic motifs.