More details emerge about the TarantinoVerse direction Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic was going in, before the film was abandoned.
Now Quentin Tarantino’s The Move Critic has been shelved by the director, possibly forever, details are slowly emerging regarding what might have been.
Tarantino – ever keen to self-mythologise – has famously imposed a ten film limit on his career meaning that his next movie will be the one that ends his career as a director. As such, he seems to be encountering a few problems pulling the trigger on his swan song given all of the pressure he has placed on himself to cap off a brilliant career with a movie that lives up to (or even outdoes) those which have come before it.
As a director who has regularly embellished his own legend, it’s a very Tarantino problem to face. And so, according to The Hollywood Reporter at least, his plan for The Movie Critic was to come up with a very Tarantino answer.
The outlet has published an ‘inside look’ at how the project fell apart. It’s well worth a read but perhaps the most notable aspect of the piece is that the film was at one stage rewritten with a heavy meta-textual slant that would see it serve as a farewell to all of Tarantino’s films.
Tarantino’s movies have always had a ‘shared universe’ quality to them (with characters and brands existing across distinct films) but according to the piece, The Movie Critic was at one point shaping up to be ‘a Tarantino goodbye meta-verse with the director’s earlier movies existing in the same era of The Movie Critic. That way, Quentin Tarantino could bring back some of the stars of his earlier work to reprise their iconic characters in “movie within a movie” moments, or to play fictional versions of themselves as the actors who played those characters.’
There’s more too. Another idea that was potentially in the mix was that ‘the film could include a movie theatre where some characters could potentially interact with a budding future auteur — such as a 16-year-old Tarantino, who worked as an usher at a Torrence porn theatre’… a collision of fiction and reality that might have been appealing to the filmmaker as it would bring his career full circle.
Far be it from us to criticise Tarantino or this project as like everybody else, we were really looking forward to it.
Plus, if anybody in modern cinema has earned the right to embark on a journey of self-glorification, it’s probably him. However, there’s an argument to be made that it all feels a bit too self-involved. It’s something we wrote about here, when we discussed the idea that perhaps the filmmaker’s concern with preserving his legacy has become too mixed up with his art. Tarantino’s struggles to mount his final project are also the focus of the latest episode of the Film Stories podcast which you can find above.
There are other details in the story too, including the statement that Tom Cruise or Paul Walter Hauser were never in the running for the film, a claim that runs contrary to much of the reporting we’ve previously heard.
The filmmaker is said to have become more excited by other projects, and while that of course is his prerogative, Tarantino has always come across as the kind of cinema geek director who will always have his head turned by the possibility of future projects.
That’s all well and good until you’ve publicly stated that you only have one more film left. At some point, you have to pick a project and stick with it. We look forward to seeing what Mr Tarantino plumps for next… and if it can hold his attention all the way to completion.
