pulp fiction - Did Vincent Vega shoot Marvin on purpose? - Movies & TV

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In a very popular scene from the movie
Pulp Fiction, Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) are
discussing about Jules' will to retire from being an
hitman.

They are carrying a guy, named Marvin,
in the back of the car, and when Vincent asks him an opinion and turns to talk to him,
the gun goes off, killing the guy
instantly.

When Jules asks for an explanation,
Vincent attributes the "incident" to the car going on a bump in the street. Is there
some canon answer about whether this was an intentional
shot or not?

By the way, if the
answer is "Tarantino left this ambiguous on purpose", I'll consider that an answer too
as long as you can back it up with some canon source. By canon I mean interviews where
Tarantino states this and/or articles from official sites.

Answer

Searching around, I found an interesting
detail. When Jules and Vincent are going to Brett's apartment, they open the trunk of
the car in order to get the guns, and this is what they
say:

 JULES
We should
            have shotguns for this 
kind of deal.


            VINCENT
How many up there?



            JULES
Three or four.

 VINCENT
Counting our
            guy?

 JULES
I'm not
            sure.


 VINCENT
So there could be five guys up
            there?

 JULES
It's possible.


            VINCENT
We should have fuckin'
            shotguns.

Vincent
says "Counting our guy?", and indeed,
they are talking about Marvin. This explains why they don't kill him in the apartment
and they take him with them. He's not an hostage, he's an
accomplice. This is not a 100% attack-proof evidence, but
if he's their guy, it might be that the shot could be indeed an accident.

Furthermore, on the href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/trivia">IMDb page about Pulp
Fiction, it is stated
that:

According to
an interview with Phil LaMarr¹, it
was he who came up with the idea of his character Marvin being shot in the face. Marvin
was originally supposed to be accidentally shot in the throat and survive. Knowing that
Marvin would die a slow, painful death, Vincent and Jules decide that Marvin should be
shot in the head and put out of his misery. Knowing that this would make the characters
unlikeable, LaMarr took his idea to Quentin Tarantino and he agreed to it, figuring that
a single-bullet kill would be funnier.

This kind of
proves the accident way, since originally he was meant to be
accidentally shot, not in a fatal way, and then be killed by the
two hitmen in order to avoid a slow and painful death. But here the death is sudden, yet
still accidental. I'll add the interview if I find it. If someone finds it, please post
it.

/>

^{1: The actor
who plays Marvin.}