Quentin Tarantino has hinted that he plans to retire after making three more films, according to an interview in which he was promoting his latest project, Django Unchained.
Tarantino told Playboy magazine: “You stop when you stop, but in a fanciful world, ten movies in my filmography would be nice. I’ve made seven, if I stop at ten, that would be OK as an artistic statement.”
Tarantino also suggested he was aware of the pitfalls of directiorial burnout and was thinking hard about how he would appear in cinematic history books. “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end.”
The Inglourious Basterds director appears to be following the example of Steven Soderbergh, another recent directorial ‘retiree’ though Soderbergh seems to have had no significant career break, with a new film Side Effects, due for release next year.
In the same interview Tarantino also outlined the casting process for the role in Django Unchained that eventually went to Jamie Foxx, naming five other actors — Idris Elba, Chris Tucker, Terrence Howard, MK Williams (from Boardwalk Empire) and Tyrese — that were under also under consideration after Will Smith turned down the part. He said he had planned to have them compete.
“I was going to put them through the paces, make them go off against one another and kind of put up an obstacle course” — but his meeting with Foxx made the competition redundant: “He’s from Texas; he understands what it’s like to be thought of as an ‘other’”
