Maxance Vincent
Quentin Tarantino has been preparing his tenth and final movie for some time, but The Hollywood Reporter has now revealed that what would’ve been his final film, The Movie Critic, will no longer happen. Reports state he was planning to shoot the movie later this year, but he is now going back to the drawing board to figure out what his teeth and final project will be.
According to sources from THR, the movie was initially centered on a cynical movie critic that Tarantino grew up reading and would be set in the 1970s. Brad Pitt was slated to star in the movie, and it’s now revealed that he would’ve reprised his role as Cliff Booth, which garnered him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
It was unclear if this would be entirely related to Hollywood, but Tarantino is now no longer doing the project. The filmmaker had always wanted to retire at the top of his game and set a clear goal to direct only ten movies. Of course, some will say that Kill Bill, Vol. 2 counts as ten, but the film was initially planned to be released in its entirety, so it doesn’t count!
Whatever Tarantino plans to do for his final film, it will be a much-discussed affair, as his filmmaking career comes to a close.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
This was such an odd project. I originally heard it was going to be a thinly-veiled roman à clef about the legendary film critic Pauline Kael, which confused me because, while she had a fairly interesting life, it wasn’t exactly a “cinematic” one. Then when all this stuff about Cliff Booth returning as a character made me suspect that what he actually wanted to make was just another historical fan fiction, but this time reimagining the New Hollywood era… well, I’m not surprised this got chucked into the bin along with his sex comedy romp, R-rated Star Trek, and Kill Bill, Vol. 3 plans.
And I don’t even know what to do with his continued insistence that “directors don’t get better as they get older.” Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with retiring from filmmaking – John Carpenter hasn’t truly worked on a film set in almost fifteen years and he’s living the dream, pursuing his musical passions, playing video games and consulting on their development (yes, really!), and hilariously trashing other directors in post-semi-retirement interviews – but… like, can Quentin Tarantino seriously not think of a single director who did some of their best work near the end of their lives? John Huston was wheelchair-bound and reliant on oxygen tanks when he directed The Dead. Maybe the two feature films he directed as an octogenarian aren’t his most celebrated works, but his third-to-last feature film, Ran, is absolutely among the top-tier of Akira Kurosawa‘s filmography and he was 75 years old at that time. The highest-grossing film of Clint Eastwood‘s career was released when he was 84. Steven Spielberg is 77 and his most recent movie was pretty darned beloved (including from a certain individual at Awards Radar…). 7 Women was a rock-solid capstone to John Ford‘s medium-redefining run. I and a lot of other people loved EO and that was produced years after Jerzy Skolimowski received a bunch of “lifetime achievement” awards in his eighties. Sure, there are filmmakers like Elia Kazan, George Cukor, and Billy Wilder whose last few works weren’t all that great, but there are plenty of others who aged phenomenally over the course of long careers. He knows he can just say “I want to do different things in the latter half of my life,” right?
It’s a pretty interesting point. I totally get him wanting to “protect” his legacy, but at the same time, he’s clearly still got the goods, so wht worry?
Akira Kurosawa was also practically blind when he made Ran, and it’s one of the (if not the) most stunning films of his career.
For sure!
It is the only cinematic reimagining of a William Shakespeare play I’ve seen that I think improves on the original work.