The 1981 movie that became the one thing Quentin Tarantino fears the most: “That can’t happen!”
Obviously, he’d deny it, but it’s beginning to look like Quentin Tarantino is doing everything in his power to avoid that tenth and final feature that brings the curtain down on his big-screen career.
You want The Movie Critic? Tough shit, he decided that he didn’t want to bow out that way, so he scrapped what was supposed to be his swansong, went straight back to the drawing board, and has offered no hints whatsoever as to what that increasingly mythical tenth movie is going to be.
You want him to start working on it sooner rather than later? Tough shit, he’s written a play instead, with The Popinjay Cavalier set to debut on London’s West End in 2027, and if it embarks on a lengthy stage run on either or both sides of the Atlantic, that gives him even more of an excuse.
The Adventures of Cliff Booth, and more recently Django/Zorro, have shown that Tarantino is open to other filmmakers making follow-ups to his work, so why can’t somebody do the same and make Kill Bill Vol 3 a reality? Tough shit on that front, too, unless you’re really into Fortnite, where he decided to return to the world of his roaring rampage of revenge.
Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for him to say out loud so many times that his tenth flick will be his last, because anything other than an instant masterpiece and one of the all-time greats will be a disappointment, not only to his fans and general audiences, but the egomaniacal man himself.
Tarantino has backed himself into a corner, based entirely on his obsession with how future generations will remember him, and it’s a corner that only one of the greatest movies ever made will allow him to escape from. He even singled out the last film from an icon as the genesis point of his greatest fear, but it’s a case that doesn’t hold too many drops of water, which doesn’t do his argument any favours.
When cinephiles think of Billy Wilder, they’ll think of the ‘Golden Age’ legend with six competitive Academy Awards from 20 nominations, and the auteur who gifted cinema with Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, The Seven-Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, to name just a few. What nobody thinks about is his final stretch of features, which couldn’t hold a candle to his earlier movies, because his best work is, was, and will remain his legacy.
“I fantasise about another 12-year-old girl or boy, 20 years after I’m dead, seeing one of my movies, liking it,” Tarantino admitted. “Seeing another movie, and then whatever they choose from the pile, because they don’t know what’s good and what’s bad, alright? I have to keep their dick hard! I have to keep them wanting to go back for more. They can’t grab Buddy Buddy! They can’t grab Buddy Buddy! That can’t happen!”
Greeted with a shrug of indifference, 1981’s Buddy Buddy was not the ideal way for a talent of Wilder’s standing to end their directing career, so he’s technically not wrong. On the other hand, the slew of seminal films he made at his peak speak for themselves, but for whatever reason, one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors ending on a bum note was the catalyst for Tarantino developing his unhealthy fixation with going out on a high of his own making, and time will tell if he can even pull it off.
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