There are two things Quentin Tarantino seems to like doing more than most: vowing to make movies he never does and claiming that he’ll only ever make 10 movies. Sometimes these two activities clash. For instance, remember when Tarantino talked up maybe doing his own, probably R-rated version of a Star Trek picture? Turns out he actually almost did that…until he couldn’t bear making that his swan song.
In a new interview with Collider, screenwriter Mark L. Smith — whose credits include Vacancy, Overlord, the forthcoming sequel Twisters, and George Clooney’s new The Boys in the Boat — opened up about working with Tarantino on his aborted Star Trek movie.
“So Quentin came in to Bad Robot, we met there, and he had this pitch, this idea of a version of Star Trek that he wanted to make,” Smith recalled. Smith says he was blown away by Tarantino’s pitch, so much so that he said he wished he’d “snuck something in to record as he’s doing his dialogue, and his acting it out is just so wonderful.”
Tarantino even wanted something that was unthinkable for him: He wanted another writer to do the script. That tuned out to be Smith, who got so far as a draft.
Sadly, as it dawned on Tarantino that Star Trek would be his final screen work, he backed out:
“[H]e started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. I remember we were talking, and he goes, “If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?” And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
Instead Tarantino decided to make a very different kind of last work: The Movie Critic, which not only finally gives him the opportunity to make a film set in the ‘70s, but may have him reworking the era’s cinematic classics, like Rolling Thunder and Taxi Driver.
Mind you, Tarantino could also back off this “10 films and done” deal. Then he can make Star Trek. Then he can make a 12th film. Then, what the hell, he could make a 13th. Maybe then — just hear us out — he could do a 14th.
(Via Collider)
