Quentin Tarantino is having another banner year, which is the case nearly every time he releases a movie. He got married, is having a kid, and his latest movie “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is a sure-fire multiple Oscar nominee for things like Best Picture, all three of the principal actors, screenplay and likely director too.
The filmmaker has threatened retirement after his 10th film—’OUATIH’ is his ninth— and for years before that he’s toyed with the idea of having a kid and riding off into the sunset. Now that a child is a reality, as is marriage and all this talk on focusing on family years before he had one, the retirement comments don’t just feel like empty talk (though he has suggested 10 feature-length movies and then retirement, TV doesn’t’ count and he could continue in this track).
The writer/director has also said for years that he’s writing several books, most of them, he’s suggested are film books—his critical analysis of movies, certain filmmakers, etc. etc.—i.e. Tarantino’s opportunity to flex his own film critic muscles. However, he’s also writing at least one book of fiction which shouldn’t be a surprise since Tarantino had suggested both “Hateful Eight” and “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” could have ended up a book as well.
In a new DGA quarterly interview with none other than Martin Scorsese, Tarantino unveiled he is writing a new book of fiction and revealed some of the details, most of which sound vaguely reminiscent to some of the ideas in “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”
“Right now, I’m working on a book. And I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there,” he said, unveiling details not that dissimilar from Brad Pitt’s character in ‘OUATIH.’
“And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini…” he continued.
“And so he’s like, ‘Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff.’ So he finds himself drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he doesn’t like and some of them he doesn’t understand, but he knows he’s seeing something.”
“So now, I find myself having a wonderful opportunity of, in some cases, rewatching and, in some cases, watching for the first time movies I’ve heard about forever, but from my character’s perspective. So I’m enjoying watching them but I’m also [thinking], ‘How is he taking it? How is he looking at it?’ I always like to have a good excuse for just throwing down into a pit of cinema.”
No other details are revealed, but it’s intriguing to hear Tarantino continue on with the meta-movie narrative and give it a personal twist. Who knows what that’ll yield, but if any Tarantino novel doesn’t like it’ll eventually turn into a movie, this sounds like it’s the one—it would likely be hard to dramatize something like this: an old guy watching movies and seeing what he thinks about them. That’s a book at best.
Anyhow, that’s obviously just the tip of the iceberg in the interview. Other topics broached are New York versus L.A. (Scorsese obviously being an East Coast guy), the “nightmare” of making “Taxi Driver” and much more. Dig into the full interview here and it’s kind of a shame it wasn’t presented in podcast form, but we’ll take what we can get.