Quentin Tarantino Confirms His Next Film Will Be His Last
Quentin Tarantino is sticking to his 10-movie promise. In a new interview with CNN‘s Chris Wallace, the filmmaker confirmed that his next movie would be his last. He has directed nine standalone films over the past 30 years. “I’ve been doing it for a long time; I’ve been doing it for 30 years. And it’s time to wrap up the show,” Tarantino, 59, said on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?. “I’m an entertainer. I want to leave you wanting more.”
Tarantino kicked off his big-screen directorial debut with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. His most recent film was 2019’s nearly three-hour Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He has won two Academy Awards for screenwriting. One for 1994’s Pulp Fiction and one for 2012’s Django Unchained. He directed both of them. The remainder of his directed standalone features includes Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Hateful Eight (2015).
Tarantino told Wallace that he doesn’t “want to work to diminishing returns.” He explained, “I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when, already, I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now. And that’s what happens — that’s exactly what happens.” When asked about what his “10th and last film is going to be,” Tarantino said he has no clue. He said, “No, I don’t, at all, ’cause I’m also not in a giant hurry to make my last movie. Right now, I don’t even know what a movie is — is that something that plays on Netflix? Is that something that plays on Amazon and people watch it on their couch with their wife or their husband? Is that a movie? ‘Cause my last movie opened up in 3,000 theaters and played all over the world for a couple of months.”
Last year, Tarantino discussed his imminent retirement and desire to avoid the possibility of ending his career on a bad movie. “Most directors’ last films are f—ing lousy. Maybe I should not make another movie because I could be really happy with dropping the mic,” Tarantino said. The filmmaker said he’d cap his career at 10 movies. But he joked about calling it quits if Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was “really well-received” prior to its release.
Tarantino expressed that he feels current-day movies are up there with some of the worst decades in American film history. “Even though the ’80s was the time that I probably saw more movies in my life than ever, at least as far as going out to the movies was concerned, I do feel that ’80s cinema is, along with the ’50s, the worst era in Hollywood history,” the director said in an interview last week. “Matched only by now. Matched only by the current era!” He added that there is only good thing about the large amount of bad movies out there. “The ones that don’t conform, the ones that stand out from the pack” get the acclaim they deserve.
In August, Tarantino praised Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, saying he “f—ing loved” the movie and saw it in the theater. “That and [Steven] Spielberg’s West Side Story both provided a true cinematic spectacle, the kind that I’d almost thought that I wasn’t going to see anymore.”
