Tarantino’s Next Big Project Is… a Book About a Guy Who Loves Movies

Quentin Tarantino may follow through with his plan to stop making movies after his Star Trek one or his horror movie one or Kill Bill 3, but that doesn’t mean he’ll stop making other things. The filmmaker will probably shift over to directing plays or extremely long movies that Netflix will awkwardly chop up and pretend are miniseries, or maybe, he’ll just reinvent himself as a novelist—since the guy has already started on a book, apparently.

During a conversation with Martin Scorsese for the Directors Guild of America’s DGA Quarterly fall issue, Tarantino revealed that he’s hard at work on a novel—and it’s about a WWII veteran who loves film, or something.

Per DGA Quarterly:

QT: Right now, I’m working on a book. And I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini…

MS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

QT: And so he’s like, “Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff.”

MS: Right.

QT: So he finds himself drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he doesn’t like and some of them he doesn’t understand, but he knows he’s seeing something.

A novel that sounds like Mad Men if Don Draper really loved La Strada isn’t exactly the kind of book you’d expect from Tarantino, but hopefully he’s got his own version of a Louis L’Amour Western in the works somewhere, too. He doesn’t give us much information about where in the writing process he is or when the book will be done, though from the way he talks about the premise, it sounds like it’s still in very early stages.

Tarantino’s screenplays have been increasingly filled with extended prose passages, and he spent five years developing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as a book before it made the jump to the big screen, so it’s probably just a matter of time before the age of Great American Novelist Tarantino is upon us. Apologies in advance to whatever editor has to try and pare those manuscripts down.

Give the entire conversation between Tarantino and Scorsese a read over at the DGA site.