In case you missed it, Quentin Tarantino is starting his own podcast, according to The Verge, reported during the holiday break. Considering all the two, three-hour podcast appearances on places like The New Beverly, and Empire podcasts, this isn’t much of a surprise (and QT’s hinted at this before). And speaking of the Empire podcast—Tarantino appeared on a three-hour Empire podcast last year with fellow filmmaker Edgar Wright—the writer/director decided to end 2021 with a last-minute appearance on the Empire podcast.
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Over an hour in length, the topic is mostly Tarantino’s novelization of “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” but there are plenty of tangents. First off, there are his future novelizations. He’s discussed in the past how he wrote a few chapters of a “Reservoir Dogs” novelization that he might finish or take to the stage, and in this podcast, he adds Tony Scott’s “True Romance,” a film he wrote, to the list of the potential novelizations he might write and finish one day (nothing else from his oeuvre sounds like it’s on the table).
Then he has more books on the way after “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.” He has his “Cinema Speculation” movie criticism book coming out possibly this year and then he’s got yet another ‘OUATIH’ spin-off, a “The Man Who Would Be McQueen: The Films Of Rick Dalton,” which puts a meta-imaginary spin on the life of Rick Dalton and an alternate universe for Quentin Tarantino.
In this alternative universe, which you may have heard of a little bit by now, Tarantino imagines he made a film in 1999 in the six-year gap between “Jackie Brown” and “Kill Bill: Volume 1.” The film is a remake of the 1979 gangster epic “The Lady In Red” written by John Sayles (“It’s Sayles best screenplay, I also think it’s the best script ever written for an exploitation movie,” Tarantino said a few years back). And if you’ve read the ‘OUATIH’ novelization, you know QT briefly mentions its existence in the book (in Tarantino’s imaginary film, Michael Madsen starred opposite Trudi Fraser, the fictional character in ‘OUATIH’ played by the young Julia Butters, got that?).
So what is his Rick Dalton book? Well, an imaginary compendium of all the imaginary movies Rick Dalton starred in before and after the events of ‘OUATIH’ and it even includes a meta imaginary Q&A with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino when he met Dalton at an imaginary film festival in Hawaii (Roger Ebert was apparently there too in this dream scenario).
“I’ve actually written it, I need to punch it up a little bit, but the body completely exists,” Tarantino explained. “I’ve written a book, called ‘The Films Of Rick Dalton.’ You know those books you could get in the ‘70s, the Films Of Charles Bronson, Anthony Quinn, that format they came in? Well, this is that.”
Tarantino says the book features a “quickie biography of his life” and this goes throughout his entire career, including episodic television, films, with reviews of each project up until Dalton’s [imaginary] retirement in 1988. And it’s written by the Tarantino of that universe, a video store clerk who became a famous filmmaker, the same guy, and the same life, only he made one additional movie in 1999, the aforementioned ‘Lady In Red’ remake (got it?).
“In this pretext,” Tarantino explains of the fantasy, “Rick retires and moves to Hawaii. And in 1998, I go to the Hawaii International Film Festival, and Roger Ebert’s there.” In this fictional story, Tarantino is asked who he wants to meet by the film festival director, it turns out Dalton is there, they meet, they chat, and the “Pulp Fiction” filmmaker eventually puts on a Rick Dalton film retrospective at that same festival the following year and arranges an official interview for his book. “This spurs me to write an appreciation of his career called, ‘The Man Who Would Be McQueen: The Films of Rick Dalton.’ It’s all written. It exists.”
So, will it actually come out? Tarantino says “Cinema Speculation” will come first and his Harper’s ‘OUATIH’ novelization publisher is definitely interested. Is this navel-gazing maybe going too far down the Tarantino rabbit hole? Even Tarantino says it will have a “limited audience,” but apparently it’s happening.
What’s next after that? Tarantino says his next major project will be directing a play. He refuses to say what it is, but we know from previous podcasts that came out last summer that he already revealed what it is: yet another version of “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” (yes, it never ends). And for his 10th and alleged final film? While he recently said it could be “Kill Bill 3” or a comedy Western, in this conversation he still says he hasn’t made up his mind at all or written anything. To be continued. Listen to the full podcast conversation below.