Quentin Tarantino has been adamant for years that he’s planning on retiring from directing feature films once he helms his tenth movie, so the bad news for fans is that there may only be one more effort to come from one of the biggest genre-defining talents of the last three decades.
The one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction reinvented American independent cinema in the 1990s, leading to a slew of imitations and thinly-veiled ripoffs. Tarantino was one of the first top-tier directors who didn’t boast an academic background of any kind, famously gaining his intimate knowledge of the medium from working in a video store and devouring as much content as possible.
His filmography has earned billions of dollars at the box office, won a combined total of seven Academy Awards from 34 nominations and spawned countless iconic characters and lines of dialogue that have infiltrated pop culture, so fans are eagerly anticipating what Tarantino is cooking up for his purported swansong. In a new interview, he even teased that he was toying with the idea of remaking Reservoir Dogs to bring his career full circle, but he quickly moved past it.
“From here on in, directors do not get better. Working for thirty years, doing as many movies as I’ve done, that’s a long career. That’s a really long career. And I’ve given it everything I have, every single solitary thing I have. That’s kind of a capture time in the moment kind of thing, but I actually considered doing a remake of Reservoir Dogs as my last movie. I won’t do it, internet! But I considered it.”
It’s not as if Quentin Tarantino will be disappearing entirely. He’s planning to write novels, short stories, comic books and even potentially make the move into episodic television when he steps away from the movie game. There’s also every chance he simply won’t retire after number ten, but he’ll be desperate to go out on the highest note possible as he looks to leave behind a legacy as one of the rare directors that didn’t watch their career succumb to the law of diminishing returns.