The one movie Quentin Tarantino will always regret never making: “Part of me wishes I could have done that”
If Quentin Tarantino had made even a quarter of the movies he’s touted at various points during his career, there’s no chance he’d be able to retire after ten films.
Those are the guns he’s sticking to, though, which means there’s only one more feature to come from one of modern cinema’s most influential auteurs. He’s got plenty to keep himself busy in the meantime, with more books incoming and a stage play in the works, but it feels like he’s dragging his heels.
The two-time Academy Award winner has batted away accusations that he scrapped The Movie Critic and focused his creative energies anywhere other than his final roll of the dice because he’s feeling the pressure of having to deliver a masterpiece as his swansong, but there has to be an element of truth to it.
After all, few filmmakers have become so obsessed with their legacy as Tarantino, who’s spent years telling everyone that he doesn’t want to fall into mediocrity. Ironically, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the perfect way to say goodbye, but since he said ten and out, there’s no chance he hasn’t thought about what would happen if he failed to stick the landing.
Nine films in 30+ years is hardly prolific, but the Reservoir Dogs creator used to spend the time between projects talking about things he never ended up making. There are literally dozens of sequels, prequels, spinoffs, R-rated Star Trek movies, comic book adaptations, and original stories he’s mentioned as potential directorial vehicles, but there’s only one he views as the one that got away.
During an appearance on The Church of Tarantino podcast, Tarantino reiterated that his original plan was to make something in the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Describing it as the “one project that stays in my mind,” he sounded regretful that he didn’t adapt The Outfit, based on Richard Stark’s 1963 novel of the same name.
It had already been made into a film that starred Robert Duvall as the author’s recurring hero, alongside Joe Don Baker as Cody and Karen Black as Bett Harrow. In the late 1990s, Tarantino envisioned those three roles being played in his version by Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Pam Grier, respectively.
“There’s a part of me that kinda wishes, now that they’re older and they can’t do it, there’s a part of me that kinda wishes I could have done that,” he admitted. Instead, Tarantino has had to watch the Parker character, or its thinly-veiled surrogates, be played by Mel Gibson in Payback, Jason Statham in Parker, and Mark Wahlberg in Play Dirty when he could have gotten there before any of them.
He’s too proud and too self-confident to say he’s got any regrets from one of the most successful and altogether important filmographies of the last three decades, but since he was asked, he felt compelled to share that his unmade The Outfit would have been the perfect movie at the perfect time, but only if he made it after Jackie Brown and before Kill Bill.
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