Quentin Tarantino really meant what he said about retiring from filmmaking. For years now, the Oscar-winning writer-director has said that he will close up shop once he’s directed 10 movies. Now that Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, his ninth film, is on the verge of hitting theaters, Tarantino is doubling down on his claims.
“I think when it comes to theatrical movies, I’ve come to the end of the road,” he said in a recent interview with GQ Australia. “I see myself writing books and starting to write theater, so I’ll still be creative. I just think I’ve given all I have to give to movies.”
It’s been said, quite frequently, that Once Upon a Time is Peak Tarantino, an ode to a formative period in Hollywood from one of the industry’s most obsessive cinephiles. If the film—starring Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie, among others—is a hit, Tarantino also said he is open to the idea of making it his last film, instead of going off and making a 10th movie.
“If it’s really well received, maybe I won’t go to 10,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stop right now! Maybe I’ll stop while I’m ahead. We’ll see.”
Pitt, who is also profiled in the GQ piece, said that he believes Tarantino is serious about this whole retiring-from-movies thing. “I don’t think he’s bluffing at all,” Pitt said. “I think he’s dead serious. And I kind of openly lament that to him, but he understands the math of when he feels like directors start falling off their game. But he has other plans, and we’re not going to have to say goodbye for a long time.”
Tarantino has been announcing his 10-film retirement plan for (at least) the last five years, revealing it in detail in a 2014 interview with Deadline. “I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off,” he said. “I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game, and I like the idea of an umbilical cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard.… I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography, and so I’ve got two more to go after this. It’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan.”
He added a slight caveat to that in 2016, saying that if he found himself wanting to make another movie decades down the line, he would go ahead and make it happen, because it would exist beyond his original canonical 10 films. “Even if at 75, if I have this other story to tell, it would still kind of work because that would make those 10. They would be there, and that would be that,” he said.
As for what that 10th movie will be, there have been rumors that Tarantino will helm the next big screen iteration of Star Trek. However, Tarantino hasn’t confirmed those reports, so whether he enters the final frontier is still anyone’s guess.
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