Planning to kick off pre-pre-production and the casting process for his next — and still, according to him, final — film, Quentin Tarantino has revealed more about what it'll be. According to the writer/director, The Movie Critic will be based on a real person, but not as has been speculated, Pauline Kael. Instead, it'll be someone far less well known.
Tarantino, speaking to Deadline's Baz Bamigboye at Cannes (where the director is presenting a screening of John Flynn’s 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder), opened up to explain more about the character's inspiration, a critic who wrote for, by QT's description, a "porno rag". Turns out Tarantino really was checking out such magazines for the articles!
"He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic, he says I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what [Taxi Driver's] Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic. Think about Travis’s diary entries."
He continues, "But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell. He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism."
According to the director, he's looking to cast someone in their mid-30s for the role, and isn't (so far) dipping into his established repertory group. And he wants to cast an American, not an Australian or someone from the UK, mostly because he doesn't seem to buy their accent work.
And while he appears committed to making the new movie his last big screen release, he'll keep on writing other projects, including plays, novels and may end up making a TV series.
Just don't expect anything in the Bond world. Though Tarantino has been rumoured as looking to direct one of the movies, he clarifies that he's never had a formal meeting about it. Which is not to say he doesn't have an idea for how to do one…
"I actually have a thought process about this. What I think they should do, and I’ve been thinking they should do this for a long time, is so many of the books have these really classic names and really classic adventures. And for the most part, a lot of them, they never did the book. They never did the stories. They took the plot line and maybe the Bond girl or maybe the villain and then just went their own way. Tom Mankiewicz just goes his own way. He did the writing for a lot of them. I think they should not remake the movies but actually just do the books, but do them the way they were written. And those would all be brand new."