Quentin Tarantino is back at the Cannes Film Festival where, just a few years ago, he premiered Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to a rapt audience. This year he’s back for a special presentation of John Flynn‘s 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder, a film that he wrote about extensively in his recent book, Cinema Speculation. But of course, Tarantino can’t make the rounds without talking about his next project, which we know will be titled The Movie Critic, and is set to be his final feature film as director.
Speaking with Deadline, Tarantino once again stressed that The Movie Critic will be about a film critic in 1970s Los Angeles, but not New Yorker Magazine writer Pauline Kael as originally theorized. Instead, the movie will take place in California in 1977, coincidentally the same year Rolling Thunder was released, “and is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
Tarantino wouldn’t offer the name of the real-life critic or the porno rag, but in his film it’ll be known as The Popstar Pages. One of Tarantino’s early gigs was loading porn mags into a vending machine, and that’s where he discovered this “really interesting movie page.”
“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic…Think about Travis’s diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”
Tarantino said the critic was in his 30s but wrote much older, like he was 55. And he died in his late 30s, possibly from alcoholism complications.
The film will enter “pre-pre-production” next month in Los Angeles, and nobody has been cast. Tarantino says guys like DiCaprio and Pitt are aged-out of the role, so we could see him turn to an actor he’s never worked with before. Honestly, it sounds like a killer role. An acerbic, foul-mouthed, alcoholic movie critic? BINGO! Where do I sign up?
EXCLUSIVE: Quentin Tarantino reveals 1977's 'Rolling Thunder' as his surprise Directors' Fortnight screening here at #Cannes. The writer-director dedicated a chapter to the film in his last book Cinema Speculation. pic.twitter.com/mm9mWiDbds
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 25, 2023
