Quentin Tarantino has written a lot of movies but hasn’t directed them all, and among those is From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez, and which originally had a line that became famous in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s career as a filmmaker began in 1992 with the crime movie Reservoir Dogs, but his big break arrived in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, another crime movie but told in a non-linear narrative.
Pulp Fiction was a big success, making Tarantino a widely known name and opening many doors for him in the film industry, but he had already been working hard to make his way in the entertainment world. By the time his filmmaking career began, Tarantino had already been working on a couple of scripts, but he couldn’t direct them all for different reasons. One of those scripts he ended up selling was the one for From Dusk Till Dawn, which landed on Robert Rodriguez’ hands, who cast Tarantino in the role of Richie Gecko.
From Dusk Till Dawn follows brothers Richie and Seth Gecko (George Clooney), a pair of criminals who take a family as hostages so they can cross into México. Said family were Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), his daughter Katherine (Juliette Lewis), and his son Scott (Ernest Liu), and on their way to México along with the Gecko brothers, they came across a large group of vampires when they stopped at a strip club. The night soon turned violent and deadly as the vampires began to attack all human customers, either killing them or turning them into vampires, as happened to Richie. This prompted the rest to fight for their lives, and it was during the battle that Jacob originally delivered a line that was included in Pulp Fiction and became widely popular: the Ezekiel Bible passage.
Though not a real passage you can find in the Bible, the Ezekiel speech that Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) delivered in Pulp Fiction became very famous thanks to its message and the intensity of Jackson’s performance, as well as the context in which he delivers the quote. The Ezekiel speech would have fitted From Dusk Till Dawn quite well as Jacob Fuller was a former pastor who retired after the death of his wife, which sent him on a crisis of faith. The line was meant to be included in the scene where Jacob is fighting vampires and walking backwards down a hallway, shielding himself with the cross he made with a shotgun and a baseball bat, right before he was attacked. This would have been an excellent addition to the character, who would have returned to his faith in what he thought were his final seconds of life.
As the line was included in one of Tarantino’s first drafts of From Dusk Till Dawn, it was eventually cut during one of its many revisions but rescued when he was writing Pulp Fiction. Although the Ezekiel speech also fitted the character of Jules Winnfield and Pulp Fiction as a whole, it would have been a lot better in From Dusk Till Dawn, though it might have not become as popular as it is now.