Quentin Tarantino is in-between movie projects at the moment, with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood becoming one of the most successful of his career. Whatever he does next will, at least according to him, be the last before retirement. But Tarantino isn’t resting easy until then. His novelization of ‘Hollywood’ is out and folks are raving about it, and he’s talked about doing a stage play that he wrote. We’ve never known what that play would be until now, and if you liked his most recent film you’re going to be happy.
Speaking on The Big Picture podcast, Tarantino reveals that he’ll be doing a stage version of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Hey, people complained the movie needed an intermission or two, well, now they’ll probably get it.
“Believe it or not, no one knows this yet. I’ve written a play version of [OUATIH],’” Tarantino said. “I finished the script, then I wrote the play version of the story, and I purposefully made it that I didn’t put scenes that are in the play in the book. I didn’t need more material, but I wanted it to exist as a play, and I was able to explore things that are in [neither] pieces. [The play] is the one that deals with [Rick Dalton’s time] in Italy.”
“That’s the idea…the next thing on the list is to start thinking about the play,” Tarantino continued. “The whole second act of the play is Rick Dalton and Marvin [the agent played by Al Pacino in the film], having dinner with Sergio Corbucci [and his wife] at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Rome.”
Tarantino added that he just kept on going when he finished the screenplay and has more than enough to work with to fill out both the novel and the play. He’s a guy who always comes up with tons of wild ideas for his films that often never see the light of day. He’s talked about doing more Inglourious Basterds, and a film that would pair up Vincent and Vega in a Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction mashup, and of course, Kill Bill which he’s been talking about again recently.
“Like the entire time I was doing ‘Kill Bill,’ I originally thought I would do three Kill Bill’ movies, one every ten years. Uma will be ten years older with each new one. And also, I’ll do an anime movie that follows this aspect of the Bride when she was with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And then I’ll do a whole animation movie that will be the origin of Bill and his three Godfathers [Hatori Hanso, Pei Mei, and Esteban Vihaio].”
If this is the direction Tarantino’s career goes, doing novelized or theatre expansions of his entire universe of movies, then I’m all for it. He also revealed that he’s written two chapters of a Reservoir Dogs novelization, which he’s been teasing recently. Whatever keeps him going and the content flowing.
