Quentin Tarantino in ‘No Hurry’ to Direct Final Movie

Quentin Tarantino is making equal space for being a dad and an iconic movie director, he told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday.

Tarantino flew to Utah from Israel for a single conversation with Elvis Mitchell, the esteemed film critic, academic and host. Mitchell hosted a weekend of cinema talks on Park City’s Main Street (“The Elvis Suite”), including chats with Bill Murray. Mitchell got down to business right away, asking why Tarantino has retreated into writing over the past few years.

“I’m in no hurry to actually jump into production,” Tarantino said. “I’ve been doing that for 30 years. Next month my son turns 5, and I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. When I’m in America, I’m writing. When I’m in Israel? I’m an abba, which means father.”

Striking an unusually tender note, Tarantino continued, “The idea of jumping on a voyage when they’re too young to understand it is not enticing to me. I kind of want to not do whatever movie I end up doing until my son is at least 6. That way he’ll know what’s going on, he’ll be there, and it will be a memory for the rest of his life.”

His daughter, he said, “is already such a genius, she’ll just get it.” The rapt audience at the Main Street eatery was full of badge holders, film fans and plenty of journalists (even though our sister publication Deadline marked its coverage of this event as “exclusive.” Please find that definition here).

Not all work has ceased in the Tarantino household, however.

“If you’re wondering what I’m doing right now, I’m writing a play, and it’s going to be probably the next thing I end up doing,” he said. “If it’s a fiasco I probably won’t turn it into a movie. But if it’s a smash hit? It might be my last movie.”

The warm and fuzzies stopped there. As Mitchell probed further about how necessary a voice like Tarantino’s is in the movie landscape, the “Pulp Fiction” directed delivered a blazing tirade about why the theater seems more rewarding than his day job. To do it justice, we’ll run his rant in full:

“That’s a big fucking deal pulling [a play] off, and I don’t know if I can. So here we go. That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the fuck is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last fucking year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just it’s a show pony exercise. Now the theatrical release, you know, and then like yeah, in two weeks, you can watch it on this [streamer] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”

It’s a stunning tonal shift from Tarantino, who proclaims to be as much a student of global cinema as he is a master. Attendees were riveted. The Elvis Suite was presented by Darling&Co, Rabbit Hole and Casamigos.