‘Tetsuo: The Bullet Man’: why Quentin Tarantino dropped out of a sci-fi cult classic
Two things Quentin Tarantino has never concerned himself with are sci-fi and franchises, but he had the opportunity to tick off both boxes in one fell swoop before ruling himself out of the equation. This must have been a decision he wrestled with, considering the project in question hailed from one of his favourite filmmakers.
The two-time Academy Award winner has toyed with both arenas on occasion, though, whether it was The Hateful Eight beginning life as a direct follow-up to Django Unchained, plans for Inglourious Basterds to be carried on through Killer Crow, or his flirtations with taking on an R-rated standalone Star Trek film.
Instead, Tarantino has focused his creative energies on crafting his own unique stories from the ground up, but he’s also been happy to lend a helping hand in a producorial capacity. The only movie he didn’t direct where he was credited as a producer was Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, but his credits stretch much further than that.
As an executive producer, Tarantino has lent his name to Roger Avary’s Killing Zoe, the straight-to-video From Dusk Till Dawn sequels, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, Scott Spiegel’s My Name is Modesty, Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel: Part II among others. Unfortunately, Shinya Tsukamoto ended up taking so long to wrap up an experimental cyberpunk sci-fi body horror trilogy that Tetsuo: The Bullet Man didn’t end up becoming part of his filmography.
The Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs steward is a huge fan of the writer, director, and producer’s work, and he should have known what he was getting himself in for after the third instalment in the Tetsuo trilogy didn’t even start gaining traction until more than a decade and a half after 1992’s Body Hammer.
Having been suitably enamoured by 1989’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its successor, Tsukamoto revealed to Dazed Digital that Tarantino had offered his services to help shepherd the trilogy-capper. “After Tetsuo II, Quentin Tarantino approached me because he want produce Tetsuo III,” he said. “I thought yeah, I can do this. But I didn’t have a plot, or a story.”
As it turns out, the director ended up taking so long that Tarantino didn’t end up producing it at all. “I started thinking about it, I started the script, but it took a very long time,” he admitted. “Too long, so long that it died down and it didn’t happen. My process was too slow. As a fan, I think he’s amazing. He’s very talented, and he shows that talent in every film he makes.”
The Tetsuo saga was plenty popular in its own right among those in the know, but having a ‘Produced by Quentin Tarantino’ credit would have given it more visibility and awareness than ever before. However, Tsukamoto’s creative process ended up being so laborious that their collaboration never came to fruition.
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