Category: quentin tarantino

A lot of younger people now believe that Quentin Tarantino is “cringe” or a “has-been” or something. Like, he’s no longer cool, and they also believe that he isn’t leaving behind much of a legacy. It’s weird because even though Tarantino has had problematic moments, he’s absolutely one of the greatest auteurs of all time and someone who fundamentally changed Hollywood and filmmaking. I even believe that QT and Paul Thomas Anderson are probably the two greatest American auteurs of the past fifty years. Anyway, one of the most random-ass things QT has ever done is promise to only make ten films and then retire. It’s become some kind of mental block for him, now that he can only make one more movie before he’s “done.” Instead of just saying “you know what, I changed my mind, I’m going to keep working,” Tarantino is backtracking from even wanting to make his tenth film, The Movie Critic. He backtracked in a lengthy interview with The Church of Tarantino podcast, and he also named which of HIS films he thinks are his best.

Even Quentin Tarantino has a favorite Tarantino movie. During an expansive interview on “The Church of Tarantino” podcast, the two-time Oscar winner revealed which of his films is his favorite and which he thinks is his best.

“‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is my favorite, ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is my best,” Tarantino said. “But I think ‘Kill Bill’ is the ultimate Quentin movie, like nobody else could’ve made it. Every aspect about it is so particularly ripped, like with tentacles and bloody tissue, from my imagination and my id and my loves and my passion and my obsession. So I think ‘Kill Bill’ is the movie I was born to make, I think ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is my masterpiece, but ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is my favorite.”

The “Pulp Fiction” director then picked his favorite and best from his screenplays.

“I think ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is my best script, and I think ‘Hateful Eight’ and ‘Once Upon a Time In Hollywood’ are right behind,” he explained. “But, there’s an aspect of ‘Hateful Eight’ that I actually think is probably my best directing of my material, i.e., the material is written and it’s solid. So it’s not like I have to create it, like ‘Kill Bill,’ it’s solid, it’s right there and I actually think it’s my best servicing [of] my material as a director.”

Despite Tarantino’s affinity for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” David Fincher will direct the highly anticipated sequel, “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” for Netflix. Elsewhere in the interview, Tarantino said he passed on directing the project because the idea of his 10th and final film being a sequel “unenthused” him. “I love this script, but I’m still walking down the same ground I’ve already walked,” Tarantino said. “It just kind of unenthused me. This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.”

Tarantino also discussed his long-rumored 10th and final film, “The Movie Critic.” He said the project was ultimately scrapped because it was too similar to his previous work.

“I wasn’t really excited about dramatizing what I wrote when I was in pre-production, partly because I’m using the skillset that I learned from ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ [of] ‘How are we going to turn Los Angeles into the Hollywood of 1969 without using CGI?’” he explained. “It was something we had to pull off. We had to achieve it. It wasn’t for sure that we could do it. … ‘The Movie Critic,’ there was nothing to figure out. I already kind of knew, more or less, how to turn L.A. into an older time. It was too much like the last one.”

[From Variety]

It’s weird that even Tarantino has recency bias, because how in the hell does he think that Inglourious Basterds, Hateful Eight and OUATIH are his best scripts??? How does Pulp Fiction not even make his top three scripts? I also don’t think IB is his best film or his masterpiece – looking back, I actually think Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2 are his masterpieces and they show a master director in full flight. And I actually kind of hated the Inglorious Basterds script? The only thing I liked about it was that it was Tarantino doing the most Tarantino thing ever for his one World War II movie. It also felt like he should have really developed the French storyline with Melanie Laurent’s character. Anyway, I hope one of the older directors – Steven Spielberg? Ridley Scott? Martin Scorsese? – talks some sense into him and tells him that he needs to let go of this dumb “I can only make ten movies” thing.

PS… Justice for Jackie Brown, which I would argue is Tarantino’s most underrated film and it’s the only time he adapted a book (which he did really well, capturing the nuances of Elmore Leonard’s text). It was the only time he had a Black female lead too.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

For more than a year, Quentin Tarantino has been writing and working on what he says will be his tenth and final film. It was supposed to be The Movie Critic. At first, people thought it would be about a Pauline Kael-type figure with a female lead. Then Quentin cast Brad Pitt in the lead role and I promptly lost interest in all of it. Apparently, Tarantino did as well – he’s “changed his mind” about the whole project and now he’s going to work on something else for his “final movie.”

Quentin Tarantino’s movies are always full of surprises, and here is one about The Movie Critic we did not expect. Deadline can reveal that Tarantino has dropped the film as his 10th and final project. He simply changed his mind, Deadline has been told.

Tarantino was going to have Brad Pitt as the principal star, which would have marked their third teaming after Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There were rumors that many from the casts of his past films might take part, and Sony was preparing to make the film after doing such a superb job on the last one.

Word is that Tarantino had rewritten his script, which delayed the start of production. But this is his 10th and final film, and Tarantino simply decided The Movie Critic will not be it.

This is the biggest surprise to Tarantino fans since years back when Deadline revealed he had shelved The Hateful Eight after he gave a small group of actors his script and one of them shared it with their rep. Soon it had been copied and the rough draft was shared all over town and online. Tarantino felt betrayed, but he eventually returned to the project after staging a reading for charity and drawing raves for it.

As for The Movie Critic, originally planned to be his 10th and final film, Tarantino has simply had a change of heart and Deadline hears he will not be moving forward with the project. Sources close to the director said he changed his mind and is going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.

[From Deadline]

Re: The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson always took credit for convincing QT to make it, because Sam loved his role so much. If Sam had been offered the lead in The Movie Critic, I’m sure Sam would have been able to talk QT into doing it. I do wonder if casting Pitt as the lead was part of the problem, but I have no evidence of that beyond “vibes.”

As for the whole “tenth and final film” – as many other people have pointed out, Tarantino just has this dumb hang-up where he can’t just say “you know what, I changed my mind, I’m going to leave myself open to still writing and directing beyond my tenth film.” So many directors are making their best or most interesting films in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Marty Scorsese is still busy as a beaver at 81 years old. Steven Spielberg waited until his 70s to make The Fabelmans, which was honestly his best film in a decade. Michael Mann and Ridley Scott are still master craftsmen with weird taste and fascinating visions. QT says he wants to retire from directing to focus more on writing and his young family, and I get that. But I also think he refuses to just admit that he’s changed his mind as he gets older.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

One of the dumbest things Quentin Tarantino ever did was set a limit to the number of films he would make. People change, circumstances change and storytellers want to tell stories. For years, QT has said that he only wants to make ten films (as a director) and then he’ll retire and do other things. While I understand why he would tell himself that, I don’t get why he continues to put that entirely arbitrary limit on himself publicly. In any case, he has announced his tenth and “final” film: The Movie Critic. It’s rumored to be another period piece, likely about the infamous critic Pauline Kael (or a character a lot like Kael).

Quentin Tarantino is back for the last time. The filmmaker behind some of the most indelible movies of the past three decades, Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood among them, is putting together what sources say is being billed as his final movie.

The Movie Critic is the name of the script that Tarantino wrote and is prepping to direct this fall, according to sources.

Logline details are being kept in a suitcase, but sources describe the story as being set in late 1970s Los Angeles with a female lead at its center.

It is possible the story focuses on Pauline Kael, one of the most influential movie critics of all time. Kael, who died in 2001, was not just a critic but also an essayist and novelist. She was known for her pugnacious fights with editors as well as filmmakers. In the late 1970s, Kael had a very brief tenure working as a consultant for Paramount, a position she accepted at the behest of actor Warren Beatty. The timing of that Paramount job seems to coincide with the setting of the script — and the filmmaker is known to have a deep respect for Kael, making the odds of her being the subject of the film more likely.

The project does not have a studio home; it could go out to studios or buyers as early as this week, according to sources. One frontrunner could be Sony, where Tarantino has a tight relationship with topper Tom Rothman. Sony distributed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the filmmaker’s 2019 opus on 1960s moviemaking, and also gave him a unique deal in which the copyright reverts to him over time. Hollywood also won two Oscars after nabbing 10 nominations and grossed over $377 million worldwide.

[From THR]

The rumor going around is that Tarantino has cast Jessica Chastain in the lead, although that doesn’t seem to be confirmed by any of the trade papers? If this is set in the 1970s and it’s about the film industry and movie critics… well, there’s a potential for an exciting ensemble. I wasn’t a huge fan of the ensemble on Once Upon a Time – it seemed a bit janky and hodge-podge, especially with the way Tarantino cast the Manson family, and I still shudder at Tarantino casting Damian Lewis for a cameo as Steve McQueen. How utterly random. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if The Movie Critic does end up being Tarantino’s final film.

people keep saying Tarantino won’t really retire and maybe he won’t, but dude’s been almost comically stone-cold serious about retiring at 60 for almost 15 years pic.twitter.com/BChgWEMmCD

— Brendan Hodges (@metaplexmovies) March 15, 2023

QUENTIN TARANTINO’S final movie is rumoured to be based on movie critic PAULINE KAEL.

Here she is speaking to DICK CAVETT in 1971 about the state of the movie industry.

Who do you think would be a good fit to play her? pic.twitter.com/ifj4bi3Elt

— James Leighton (@JamesL1927) March 15, 2023

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Quentin Tarantino has written a book called Cinema Speculation, where he writes about everything from his earliest film influences, to how his perspective on certain films has changed over time, to which film critics he loved and loves and tons more. To promote the book, Tarantino invited the LA Times into his LA home (he also has a home in Israel) to chat about films, filmmaking and this book. The LA Times piece is a great read – even if you’re not particularly a fan of Tarantino, I don’t think anyone can deny his encyclopedic knowledge and love of film, and his fascinating critical eye. You might not agree with his perspective, but he has one and he can back it up enthusiastically. Tarantino is not fully highbrow or lowbrow – he’s not “only” into art films, nor does he refuse to acknowledge the fun and joy of popcorn entertainment. This comes up in the interview, especially when the topic of superhero films comes up. Some highlights:

Traumatized by ‘Bambi’: “I think ‘Bambi’ is well known for traumatizing children. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. The only other movie I couldn’t handle and had to leave was at a drive-in in Tennessee. I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven‘s ‘Last House on the Left.’ So for me, ‘Last House on the Left’ and ‘Bambi’ are sitting on the f— shelf right next to each other. Both take place in the woods. and both had me saying, ‘I gotta get out of here!’”

Respect for real film criticism: “Doing this made me respect the professionals of film criticism even more for the simple fact that I realized I couldn’t do what they do. If my job was to go and watch the new movies every week and then write what I thought, I can’t imagine I would have anything to say about everything, other than offer a plot summary and a ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘indifferent’ verdict. With the book, I wanted to find something quirky that’s interesting and worth talking about.”

He wrote a lot about screenwriter/filmmaker Paul Schrader: Schrader is known for films centered on tormented men and their righteous fury. “I don’t want to be the one to break down his theme in a sentence, but inarticulately, lonely men with nothing but a profession existing in four walls. And sometimes those four walls are their apartment, sometimes they’re a city, sometimes they’re the f— planet Earth. Sometimes it’s just other human beings and how they bump up against the four walls until, usually, there’s blood all over them.”

QT has some snarky moments in the book: Tarantino calls them “snarky little asides out of the corner of my mouth,” and they usually arrive in a parenthetical, such as when he muses that, just as ’60s anti-establishment auteurs rejoiced when studio musical adaptations fell out of favor, today’s filmmakers “can’t wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies.”… “The analogy works because it’s a similar chokehold,” Tarantino says.

When will the tide turn on superhero films? “The writing’s not quite on the wall yet. The way it was in 1969 when it was, ‘Oh, my God, we just put a bunch of money into things that nobody gives a damn about anymore.’”

Why he’s never done a comic book movie: “You have to be a hired hand to do those things. I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”

Star Wars versus Jaws: Jaws “might not have been the best film ever made. But it was easily the best movie ever made…Of course, I liked ‘Star Wars.’ What’s not to like? But I remember — and this is not a ‘but’ in a negative way, but in a good way. The movie completely carried me along and I was just rocking and rolling with these characters…. When the lights came on, I felt like a million dollars. And I looked around and had this moment of recognition, thinking, ‘Wow! What a time at the movies!’ Now, that’s not necessarily my favorite exact type of film. At the end of the day, I’m more of a ‘Close Encounters [of the Third Kind]’ guy, just the bigger idea and Spielberg setting out to make an epic for regular people, not just cinephiles. Few films had the kind of climax that ‘Close Encounters’ had. It blew audiences away.”

[From The LA Times]

One of the things I appreciate about Tarantino is that he really and truly appreciates “the critic.” He might not agree with many critics, but he reads what they have to say and he values film criticism more than nearly every other director. As for what he says about comic book films… I’ve had that feeling too, that at some point, the bottom is going to drop out of the whole business model. But he’s right, it hasn’t happened yet and it probably won’t happen for years. But there is this pervasive sense within Hollywood of “when is this sh-t going to end” and “can we do something to disrupt this business model.”

Photos courtesy of Alessandro Serrano’ / AGF Foto / Avalon.