In some alternate reality, Quentin Tarantino isn’t capping himself at ten films. He’s still cranking them out well into his 80s — and somewhere in there, he’s making that R-rated Star Trek he once pitched.
But we don’t live in the MCU. This is reality, and Tarantino seems dead set on quitting after ten. Still, every year or so, new tidbits from his scrapped Star Trek script surface, each one making the project sound wilder than the last.
At Fan Expo Boston on Saturday (via Collider), Simon Pegg, who played Scotty in the rebooted Star Trek trilogy, said J.J. Abrams and producer Lindsey Weber once walked him through the plot, and it was every bit as wild as you’d expect from Tarantino.
That was what we call in the business batsh*t crazy. It was everything you would expect a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek script to be.
Pegg said he “would have loved” to see Star Trek filtered through Tarantino’s direction, though he admitted the franchise’s purists might not have been so enthusiastic.
I think it would have been such an incredible sort of curio to see Star Trek through his lens. I don’t know how it would have gone over with the fans, but it certainly would have been an interesting thing.
The story was set to unfold on an Earth-like world stuck in a 1930s gangster era, drawing from the season two Star Trek: The Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action,” where the Enterprise crew visits a planet modeled after old-school mob culture.
Back in December 2017, Tarantino pitched Abrams an idea for an R-rated Star Trek — one set in an entirely separate timeline from Abrams’ films, with both Patrick Stewart and William Shatner eyed to reprise their iconic roles. In May 2019, Tarantino confirmed his Star Trek script was finished and that he planned to tackle it right after “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
But, as screenwriter Mark L. Smith recounted, the following year Tarantino made up his mind: he would direct just one more movie before retiring — and it wouldn’t be Star Trek. By January 2020, QT was officially out.
He started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.
This self-imposed ten-film cap comes from Tarantino’s belief that directors inevitably decline with age, and he wants a filmography “without a misfire.” The trouble is, history doesn’t really back him up.
Robert Altman made “Gosford Park” at 76. Kurosawa delivered “Ran” at 75. Scorsese gave us “The Wolf of Wall Street” at 72. Hitchcock made “Frenzy” at 74. Agnès Varda was 79 when “Faces Places” premiered at Cannes. Buñuel was 77 when “The Obscure Object of Desire” stunned audiences. Some filmmakers get wiser, not duller, with time.