Quentin Tarantino, king of stylish movie violence and director of cult favourites such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown, has announced that he will retire from filmmaking after directing two more films.
"Drop the mic. Boom. Tell everybody, "Match that s***", he told an audience, with characteristic restraint, at an Adobe Max-sponsored creativity conference in San Diego yesterday.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 53-year-old then explained how he would like to be remembered after his retirement.
John Travolta in the Quentin Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction.
"Hopefully, the way I define success when I finish my career is that I'm considered one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived. And going further, a great artist, not just filmmaker," he said, in response to a question from interviewer Ann Lewnes.
The director, whose recent titles include the critically acclaimed Inglourious Basterds and bloody western The Hateful Eight, said that he is planning to direct a total of 10 movies. According to the director's own count, to date he has made eight feature films.
He also hinted that one of his two planned future features could be a "Bonnie and Clyde-esque tale" set in the Australia of the 1930s, and indicated that he is hoping to work on a project connected to "the year 1970", which he sees as a crucial turning point in the history of cinema.
The latter, however, is unlikely to be a film.
"It could be a book, a documentary, a five-part podcast," Tarantino said, echoing earlier comments made during the Lumière Festival in Lyon, France, in October, during which he said that he was still "figuring it [his 1970 project] out" (as reported by Deadline).
Speaking at the festival, the director explained that his newfound obsession with the year 1970 was inspired by a book titled Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies And The Birth Of The New Hollywood, by Mark Harris.
Cast members, and Brad Pitt as Ltd Aldo Raine, star in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards.
Harris's book chronicles the battle between the traditional, old-fashioned values of "Old Hollywood" and the more cynical, post-Vietnam values of "New Hollywood", arguing that the cultural revolution of the late Sixties led to a dramatic change in the types of films that audiences wanted to see.
"The more I started going to the library and looking up newspaper articles of what it was like, I realized New Hollywood had won the revolution but whether it would survive wasn't clear," Tarantino said. "Cinema had changed so drastically that Hollywood had alienated the family audience."
"Society demanded [the new, groundbreaking type of filmmaking] but that doesn't mean that they supported it as a business model and it made me realize that New Hollywood cinema from 1970-76 at the very least was actually more fragile than I thought it was. That experiment could have died in 1970."
