If what follows seems minor, forgive this writer’s continued interest in whatever may or may not be happening with Quentin Tarantino, a particular kind of focus falling to the questionable matter of Kill Bill: Vol. 3. Although there already exists at least two not-insignificant things to suggest this effort has been tabled — an oh-so-likely failure to reach the 2014 date he’d carved out for himself back in 2004; as well as semi-recent public statements, which cast their own doubts — what follows should solidify it while, too, pointing toward a future somewhat different than what the man himself recently forecasted.
Let’s get to a potential trilogy-sealer first: speaking to The Independent (via Collider), Tarantino stated, “I don’t think about Kill Bill 3 that much, as… we already visited them.” (“Them,” I assume, stands for Beatrix Kiddo and her daughter, B.B. Oh, how acquainted we’ve all become with this old quote.) It should be left at that, really, both because it’s closer to a confirmation and, in part, because we can focus on something a little more substantial: comments from last year saw the director proclaim, almost proudly, that he’s aiming to halt the filmmaking career with ten films or reaching the age of 60 — what comes first, or whatever stokes a desire to shut down with some more force. Now, however, we’re hearing something a bit different, his newest comments stating, “OK, it would sound really cool because it’s a round number and it would make sense as I would have made three movies per decade, but it’s not fixed in time. I still have some more things to do before being done with movies.”
One of said things may be a western that, he says, is almost done with its scripting stage, but there also exists the possibility of… well, a number of things which have sparked his interest over the past year, as that prior link would evince. Tarantino for better and for worse, is always difficult to gauge in terms of future developments, though this quote provides an (I think) interesting perspective as to where he’s currently sitting: “There are no genres I absolutely want to do any more, like ticking boxes. […] If there was something I would like to work on again, it would be Honshu’s movies, maybe. Or a horror movie, perhaps.” No matter what comes next, we’ll be waiting in anticipation.
Do you think Tarantino’s future plans are an admirable quality, or a bit overzealous?