An in-depth interview with Quentin Tarantino has been published via French outlet La Liberation. There’s a lot to chew on here, but I’ll start with Tarantino describing his next film, “The Movie Critic.”
It’s Travis Bickle if he were a film critic.
So, a loner, isolated individual, who happens to review movies for an underground porn rag. Sounds great.
The film, which is set in 1977, is still aiming to shoot this fall. There have been no other details in regards to plot, casting and additional characters. However, it won’t be affected by the writers strike and the interview even specifies that Tarantino refused to answer any questions about the ongoing strike.
Tarantino goes on to describe the fascinating world of his next film, which has its main character navigating through The underground porn world, a setting that Tarantino seems to know intimately:
I really, really, really like sex in movies, even though I'm not a big fan of porn, XXX. I've seen some that I liked, but overall I think they're bad movies. But these X movies from the 70s, it's not that they're good, but there's something about this weird seventies vibe... It's outlaw cinema, and an aesthetic that I love. Just as I always liked sexploitation films, or all that Swedish stuff that was coming out in the United States at the time… I'm also thinking of German stuff like “Schoolgirl Report”.
In this same interview with Liberation, Tarantino goes on to give his two cents about modern-day film criticism which he believes has no identity, which has kept him out of the loop on who writes what:
Today, I don't know anyone. Is it my fault? Theirs? What remains are website names: CinemaBlend, Deadline. I am told: “There are still good critics.” And I always answer: who? I say this without sarcasm. I'm told, "Manohla Dargis [of the New York Times], she's excellent." But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don't care! OK, if The New York Times is at my disposal then I’ll open it, read it, but that's it. I used to know a critics style of writing, their tastes, intimately! The sad reality is that today, the voice of Manohla Dargis – and it's nothing against her – doesn't matter enough for me to read her opinion on “Notes on a Scandal” or the fourth Transformers.
Although set in the world of X-rated movies, don’t expect any actual nudity in his next film. Tarantino says he’s not interested in shooting sex scenes in his movies and that “intimacy coordinators makes me even less keen on doing it”.
Back to “The Movie Critic,” the main character is said to be a critic for the Hollywood Press (a cheap 70's porno magazine that featured mainstream film criticism).
These last few months, Tarantino has given us some hints that it might be based on late film critic Jim Sheldon. Tarantino mentioned at Cannes that the main character of his new film died in his 30s but I cannot find any info on Sheldon’s personal life — he’s literally an unknown critic who stayed in the underground during his entire writing career and then vanished.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.