Auteur extraordinaire and self-publicising egomaniac Quentin Tarantino has announced his intention to retire after his 10th film, to the surprise and disbelief of many.
During a recent Q&A for his new western, The Hateful Eight, he declared ‘I don’t think you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off.’ Probably a smart move, when you look at the career of Woody Allen, whose reputation has been severely tarnished by his recent Europe-by-numbers series of smug romcoms.
So far Tarantino has maintained the aesthetic of slick, ultra-violent, biting comedy set up by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction to a remarkable standard, not only obtaining the ultimate cult status but also receiving widespread mainstream acclaim. 2009’s Inglorious Basterds was a masterpiece of razor-sharp, controversial meta-cinema, lauded by critics and fans alike , as was 2012’s Django Unchained, receiving at total of 5 Academy Award nominations. The Hateful Eight, a post-Civil War film about a group of strangers who get caught in a blizzard, starring Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum and Tarantino regular Samuel L. Jackson, promises to follow suit.
He intends to make only two more films after this, leaving his filmography at an aesthetically cohesive 10. However, whether Tarantino will stick to this statement is another question. Teasingly, he added that ‘it’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan’. His collaborators on The Hateful Eight were naturally not in the least convinced by this statement, with Kurt Russell disbelievingly snorting ‘you don’t actually believe that shit do you?’ He previously declared that the film The Hateful Eight would never be made, after a version of the script was leaked online, and changed his mind a mere 8 weeks later. Whether he will indeed ‘leave (us) wanting more’ remains to be seen. As Russell implies, he may hang on kicking and screaming making violent, exploitative, sub-par action films with disproportionately long and pointless cameos for himself.
Either way, having announced his intention to continue ‘writing plays and books, going gracefully into my tender years’, we can probably expect a continuation of his Dali-esque money hungry, women-hating interview style and media presence, rather than a Tarantino shaped vaccum in the pop- culture sphere, at least for the foreseeable future.