Roger Avary, the American director and Screenplay writer, won an award in 1995 for best original screenplay, for the movie Pulp Fiction. But this is not the only eventful part of his life, which took an unfortunate turn in the year 2008.
In September 2009, Avary, known for his works Pulp Fiction and Killing Zoe, to mention a few, was sentenced to jail after he pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and DUI for a January 2008 car crash that caused the death of his co-passenger.
Recently, Roger Avary and his friend and co-writer of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino, appeared in Joe Rogan's podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. In the podcast, Tarantino and Avary talked about their early days working at a CD rental store in Manhattan and how they bonded over their shared love for storytelling and films, their creative collaborations, etc.
The wild night in Paris that inspired the movie Killing Zoe
In the podcast, Avary while discussing how his directorial debut movie Killing Zoe came to life recalled an incident that contributed to the script of the movie. According to Roger Avary, once while visiting Paris he ran into an acquaintance who offered to show them the "real Paris".
While in Paris, he ended up in a situation where the said acquaintance and his friends were doing heroin. Avary mentioned that while standing aside and watching this, he also jotted down the conversations that were happening because he thought they were great. While telling the tale on the podcast, he said,
"Suddenly that happens and his friends were like 'Oh, doing it through the nose doesn't even affect me anymore'. And I'm like, writing these lines down like, 'This is great sh*t'."
This came in handy later when he quickly wrote a script for Killing Zoe after he received a call from Lawrence Bender asking him if he had a script based on banks or bank robbery they could make a movie as he had found a great location. According to him the places, conversations, and even the people he met in Paris because of his acquaintance influenced the script.
Roger Avary and the DUI case
January 13, 2008, Roger Avary was arrested by the police on gross vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving charges in connection with an accident that killed a passenger in the car.
According to reports, on January 13, 2008, Roger Avary was driving, while drunk, a Mercedes at the speed of 100mph before it went out of control and hit a telephone pole in Ventura County, California. The crash caused the death of 34-year-old Andreas Zini, who was Avary's friend and a passenger in his car. The force of the crash threw Avary's wife, Gretchen, out of the car causing serious injury.
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Though he initially pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included "gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony counts of causing bodily injury while intoxicated", later on, August 18, 2009, he pleaded guilty to the charges. On September 29, 2009, Roger Avary was sentenced to one year in jail and five years in probation.
The Guardian at the time also reported that he paid a settlement of $4.1m (£2.5m) for the civil suit filed by Andreas Zini's family. According to reports he was initially in a work Furlough program but once his tweets about his stay in the facility surfaced online he was reportedly shifted to Ventura County Jail.
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