Quentin Tarantino has been adamant over the last several years that he wants to stop directing movies before they gets bad. He told Playboy in 2012: “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f—s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.” The acclaimed director has claimed he’d like to make just 10 movies and be done around 60, which he turns this year. Now a new report claims this is indeed set to be the case.
According to The Hollywood Reporter’s sources, Tarantino has penned his final movie, which is called The Movie Critic. Apparently, the film is set in late 1970s Los Angeles, which would be about a decade after the 1969 setting of his last movie, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the new film will be a sequel or spin-off, but we wouldn’t put it past the director to include characters or references to the 2019 movie as he’s done in some of his others. The Movie Critic is also rumoured to have a female lead, who may well be based on Pauline Kael.
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Kael was an incredibly influential film critic, essayist and novelist, who died in 2001. During the late 1970s she worked very briefly as a consultant for Paramount after she was requested by Warren Beatty. Tarantino has a deep respect for Kael, making her a likely candidate for the lead character.
Interestingly the filmmaker has previously said that if he had not become a film director, he’d have liked to have been a film critic. Since directing Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, he’s published two books. The first is a novelisation of the latter and the second is a part memoir, part film-theory book called Cinema Speculation.