The “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” novelization is out now from Harper Perennial. That means director/author Quentin Tarantino is out there doing the press rounds talking to major outlets. He’s already been on Marc Maron and Bill Maher, and yesterday, Tarantino turned up on the Joe Rogan podcast on Spotify. The conversation is a whopping 173 minutes (2.8 hours). You can imagine every topic under the sun is broached (and unfortunately, Rogan and Tarantino bond about cancel culture and Rogan continuing his entire “they would never let you make that these days” complaint about politically correct policing culture and Tarantino mostly going on with that grievance and the idea that characters should never change or apologize for who they are).
Though it does seem to permeate the entire conversation, culture war annoyances aside, one early tidbit is pretty interesting. Tarantino says he will do a new video store podcast with his old buddy and “Pulp Fiction” co-writer Roger Avary. “Roger and me worked at Video Archives together, and we’re actually getting ready to start a podcast together,” he revealed. It’s gonna be called The Video Archives Podcast show, and we’ll just take one movie from that era, the ‘70s, ‘80s, or the ‘90s, the time of the store, and just kind of examine it, and it’ll be us and a guest, and they’ll examine it too. They’re a customer, and we’ll just talk about stuff.”
File that under must-listen whenever it comes out.
The second notable story’s been told before, but perhaps not to this level of in-depthness. And it’s a casting tidbit that’s not as famous as some of the other near-misses like Tarantino writing John Travolta’s part in “Pulp Fiction” for Michael Madsen (Madsen just booked a film and was unavailable) or Warren Beatty turning down the title role in the “Kill Bill” films.
Tangentially, much of the conversation revolves around “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.” Still, the connection is, Tarantino began writing ‘Hollywood’ over an eight-year period and wrote the first version of the story during the press tour for “Death Proof.” In some ways, it wasn’t meant to be a film, just something Tarantino would write to get him into the mood for writing and to swing him to the next film. In fact, he says it ‘Hollywood’ was originally intended to be a book, then a play, then eventually morphed into a proper screenplay (“In between projects it was something I would do to get myself back into writing again,” he explained).
Eventually, Tarantino explained the story of Mickey Rourke almost being cast as the lead in “Death Proof,” the part that eventually went to Kurt Russell and Rourke actually being Tarantino’s first pick.
“My first choice was Mickey Rourke,” Tarantino said when Rogan asked him how he knew Kurt Russell would be the best fit for the part. “It was going to be Mickey and Mickey wanted to do it, but then his agents started…well, his agents said, ‘Well, they need Mickey.’ And so the agents started fucking with us.”
“It was one of those things where Robert [Rodriguez] was doing his [“Grindhouse“] movie ‘Planet Terror‘ first, so I’m waiting to do mine when he’s done,” he continued. “And the agent was fucking around with us, and I was literally like, ‘Here’s one of the offers,’ you have until nine o’clock Friday night to accept or reject, and they just let that deadline blow-by, and so that was it.”
Tarantino definitely sounds like a filmmaker that doesn’t play those games and never ever took their calls past that point.
READ MORE: Quentin Tarantino Says He’s Still Contemplating Retirement After Tenth Feature
On top of the original stageplay, he’s written that Tarantino mentions in this podcast again (though doesn’t at all reveal any details, but suggests he wants to make it before his final film), Tarantino says he hopes to do “The Hateful Eight” and “Reservoir Dogs” on stage and direct them. “I doubt I would do novelizations for everything that I’ve written, but I could see myself doing a novelization of ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ That would be cool,” he added.
If you’re curious, Tarantino definitely doubles down on retirement and asks what he will do after he stops making films; the filmmaker says one big thing will be just parenting and hanging out with his now 15-month-old son, Leo. But first and foremost, he says he will write. “I’m a writer; I’ll write books, I’ll write fiction books, I’ll write non-fiction books about cinema. I’ve written a play, I’ll intend to do that after I finish the first two books, and we’ll see how many more of those happen. And then eventually I’ll get around to making that [final film], I’m not in a hurry to do the 10th one, but eventually, it’ll present itself to me.”
Listen to the full, nearly three-hour conversation below.
