Quentin Tarantino has famously said that he will retire after his tenth (and therefore next) feature film, and has spent a fair bit of time considering how he’ll close out his acclaimed moviemaking career. Speaking on the Pure Cinema Podcast earlier this year, he jokingly suggested that he should end on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood — “Because I could be really happy with dropping the mic” — while he told Bill Maher that he considered making his final film a Reservoir Dogs reboot.
Now, the Pulp Fiction filmmaker has taken on the question of what makes a good last movie yet again. Discussing David O. Russell’s The Fighter on the Big Picture podcast, he says that the American director “was over himself and over being the auteur”, and “just wanted to make a good movie that people are going to enjoy”.
“There was something really refreshing about him saying that, and that perspective,” Tarantino adds, hinting at a possible direction for his final film. “If I just wanted to make a good movie, that I knew would be good, I would take David Morrell’s novel for First Blood and do the novel.”
Tarantino distances himself from a remake of the 1982 action film starring Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, however, reiterating that his focus would be on the source material, Morrell’s 1972 book. Who would ideally play Rambo in Tarantino’s version? None other that Marriage Story’s Adam Driver, starring across from past collaborator Kurt Russell.
“Kurt Russell would play the sheriff, and (Adam Driver) would play Rambo,” Tarantino says, adding: “Every time I read it, the dialogue is so fantastic in the David Morrell novel that you’re reading it out loud. It would be so good.”
Admittedly, it would be an interesting change of pace for Driver, after starring across from Lady Gaga in Ridley Scott’s upcoming Gucci murder film, House of Gucci. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that likely to happen, as Tarantino isn’t satisfied with the prospect of making a “good film”.
“Now I want to do more than that,” he goes on. “But if it was just about to make a good movie, that’s out there.”
Tarantino’s planned retirement from the director’s chair won’t necessarily mean that fans are starved for new content. He’s previously announced plans to move into other mediums, such as television, and recently penned a novelisation of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which he describes as a “complete rethinking” of the film. He also has a non-fictional cinema book on the way, titled Cinema Speculation.