At this stage, it’s highly unlikely that we’re ever going to see Quentin Tarantino direct a Star Trek movie. After all, the filmmaker has been telling anyone who’ll listen while making the press rounds for his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization that he’s still sticking to his guns when it comes to retiring after his tenth feature, which just so happens to be his next one.
That means the chances of him bowing out by tackling a pre-existing property are incredibly slim, even though it would admittedly be somewhat in keeping with his penchant for subversion if the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs legend were to call it a day with a big budget sci-fi blockbuster that’s part of a major franchise.
The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith was tasked to crack the screenplay based on the ideas that he and Tarantino had bounced back and forth, and in a new interview the writer offered up some new details about what the duo were cooking up, and it sounds as though it had the potential to completely upend Star Trek as people knew it.
“It was through J.J. Abrams, through Bad Robot. I’ve done a few things with them. And so they always bring me stuff. But Tarantino, he wanted to do this. And so we all gathered in a room and we talked about the ways in. After that, they just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up’. And I said, ‘Yeah’. And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.
Then just we started working. I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films. We were there for hours. We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. There’s all this other… it’s really wild.”
An R-rated Star Trek with a heavy emphasis on Captain Kirk and the rest of the original Enterprise crew that took the form of a 1930s gangster movie produced by J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot sounds so insane that it’s a shame we’ll never get to see it. Then again, Tarantino is intent to keep his creative juices flowing by writing more novels and comic books once he steps away from behind the camera, so maybe one day we’ll get to see what he had in store, just in a completely different medium than cinema.
