He’s back with a Western (The Hateful Eight) on one of the biggest formats available, but it appears Quentin Tarantino might be looking to a smaller screen for one of his other long-cherished projects. The director is considering bringing Elmore Leonard’s Forty Lashes Less One to TV for a miniseries.
Talking to Premiere (with a translation provided by Birth. Movies. Death.), Tarantino answered a question about potential future projects now that The Hateful Eight is ready to hit cinemas. “It always takes me a while before thinking about the future. That said, I own the rights to this book I've wanted to adapt for a while, and the time may have come for me to tackle it. This is Forty Lashes Less One, by Elmore Leonard... which could be my third Western. I'm considering taking the project to TV, in the form of a mini-series of four or six hours.”
The 1972 novel is set in Yuma Prison, a soul-destroying lockup with a population that includes two men facing life sentences whose worlds are destined to line up. Harold Jackson, the only black man in the place, and Raymond San Carlos, half-Apache, are enemies at first, but become allies by necessity when they’re offered the possibility of a pardon if they can hunt down Arizona’s five most wanted outlaws. You can see why QT has long wanted to bring this to the screen, particularly given his previous success adapting Leonard with Jackie Brown.
There are no concrete plans yet, though he has form with television, having conceived and directed a memorable CSI two-parter back in 2005. And just imagine him let loose from the shackles of US network TV (and the film ratings boards) on somewhere like HBO or Netflix. Plus, this, as with The Knick's Steven Soderbergh, sidesteps his long-mooted talk of retiring from filmmaking – we still get new Tarantino work, just in a different venue…
The Hateful Eight is out on January 8.