Hear Me Out: Quentin Tarantino must direct and star in an Elon Musk biopic
Ever since the release of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood in 2019, Quentin Tarantino has been avoiding making his tenth and final film as if his life depended on it.
He’s dabbled in theatre, book writing, and television (almost), but lately, he’s chosen a much more cliché outlet for self-aggrandisement and procrastination: podcasts. It’s surprising that he didn’t alight upon this medium before, for as a white man who has stalwartly typed the n-word into every script since the ’90s and seems to view women from foot-level only, he is a prime candidate for the one-man-with-a-microphone-and-no-brain-cells format.
Over the course of his erratic and mind-numbingly tedious podcast career, Tarantino has gone viral a few times for being a first-class a-hole. The most infamous of his unprovoked rants was when he went on the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast and called Paul Dano “the weakest fucking actor in Sag” and “the limpest dick in the world”. For some, this seemed to come out of nowhere, and for the rest of us, it was a reminder of that time when, sometime in the ‘90s, he and Paul Thomas Anderson were so insufferable that they inspired Fiona Apple to quit cocaine.
It was also a strange criticism coming from a man who very literally is “the weakest fucking actor in Sag”. Anyone who has ever been too slow to hit the fast-forward button whenever he shoehorns himself into his own movies will know that watching Tarantino act is like watching Liz Truss explain the economy: the confidence is breathtaking.
This brings us to Elon Musk and Tarantino’s unfinished business. That tenth film that he’s been banging on about for so long has yet to materialise, where he’s scrapped multiple projects for one reason or another and ceded his opportunity to make a Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood follow-up to David Fincher. As he retreats deeper and deeper into the manosphere and engages in a no doubt short-lived flirtation with Sylvester Stallone, it seems entirely possible that the Pulp Fiction director will chicken out altogether and leave his filmography frozen at nine features. However, the solution is clear: that tenth film should be a Musk biopic.
If there was ever a role Tarantino could play, it’s the role of a man who is so awkwardly performative that he makes every public appearance more cringey than Tarantino’s attempt at an Australian accent. Do yourself a favour and watch him try to formulate a response when an interviewer asks him why he wants X to be a form of “collective consciousness”. Like Tarantino’s acting skills, Musk’s ability to think deeply about things is an amateurish hoax built within an echo chamber of yes-men, and when you combine the two, you might have an Oscar-worthy performance on your hands.
This would be a groundbreaking feat of stunt casting, right up there with Ryan Murphy casting Kim Kardashian as a divorce attorney. Stunt casting requires the real-life background of the performer to do most of the storytelling, something Tarantino has employed many times throughout his career. Whether it was the over-qualified Pam Grier in Jackie Brown or various nepo babies playing members of Charles Manson’s Family in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, the director has often relied on the audience’s knowledge of his actors’ history to flesh out the stories he’s telling. In this case, he and Musk share many parallels that would immediately lend layers of meaning to the director’s performance that his acting skills absolutely couldn’t.
Both men are constantly promising things that they know they can’t deliver: self-driving cars, movies, and more, both asserted their cleverness early in their careers and quickly proved that it was finite, inflexible, and highly derivative, both have channeled their energies in recent years towards punching down, be it at entire government agencies or beloved actors, and both seem to be getting angrier by the day that running their mouths has occasional social consequences. Having Tarantino play Musk would be a stroke of genius, a meta-casting choice that would make both men seem to be in on the joke while also being the punchline.
I know what you’re thinking; at 62, Tarantino is too old to play 54-year-old Musk, but I think if he ceases all exercise and starts pulling all-nighters to post AI-generated videos of naked women who refused to father his children, he could become Musk’s spitting image in a matter of weeks. This could be a career-defining project for Tarantino as well, and while those who love his early work might despair at this evolution, hey, it could be his magnum opus.
At this point, he just needs to get something into cinemas before his extracurricular ranting becomes his legacy. All he’d have to do here is transcribe some Joe Rogan episodes, add a scene for Samuel L Jackson, and swap his favourite racial slur with the dogwhistling ‘Roman’ salute. The project would, like the ending of Casablanca, be the perfect combination of shocking but retrospectively inevitable.
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