Quentin Tarantino and Star Trek, a long story that will probably not end in the cinema. The director of Kill Bill would have abandoned the project for a new episode of the space saga that was close to his heart for years. In 2019, he himself announced his intention to produce a “Pulp Fiction in space”. For once, he enlisted the services of Mark L. Smith, who had worked on The Revenant by Alejandro Inarittu or Midnight in the Universe by Georges Clooney. The first drafts were “really cool”, testifies the screenwriter in an interview with Collider. But Tarantino, who has repeatedly repeated that he would end his career as a director after a tenth film, was seized by doubt. “Star Trek might be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end?”, he would have confided to his screenwriter.
Mark L. Smith assures today that “the script is still on the desk” of Quentin Tarantino, while estimating that the project will probably never see the light of day.
Star Trek by Tarantino? It’s hard to imagine what the result could have been. Such a production would certainly have been very different from the 14 films in the saga, directed by filmmakers as different as Robert Wise, Nicholas Meyer or J. J. Abrams. It would probably have been incommensurable with the rest of Tarantino’s production, whose style is recognizable among thousands, from Reservoir Dogs to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
“I would love to see this happen,” Mark L. Smith repeats to Collider. (…) It would be the best Star Trek film, not for my writing, but for what Tarantino was going to do with it. It was just kind of breathtaking stuff. I think his vision was to go all out. It was a hard rated R [forbidden to under 17s Editor’s note]. There was going to be Pulp Fiction violence. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue, we kept some elements for special characters to fit them into the Star Trek universe, but it was really Tarantino’s edginess and flair that he brought to this movie. That would have been cool.”
Since March, the director has repeated that his tenth and final film is ready. Quentin Tarantino’s swan song is already reportedly being filmed. “I have finished the script for what will be my last film,” declared the director of Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, interviewed in Paris on the occasion of the release of his new essay Cinéma Speculations (Flammarion) by the general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux. “I imagine I’ll probably shoot it in the fall,” he added.
Entitled The Movie Critic, the film is said to be inspired by the life of a film critic who worked for a porn magazine in California in 1977. “Afterwards, I will make books, TV series, plays… But on cinema, I’m going to throw in the towel,” he testified at the microphone of France Inter.
