Quentin Tarantino Reveals His Idea For A Sci-Fi Feature
Quentin Tarantino is a busy man. Talk of his grim, dirty western, The Hateful Eight, has heated up again, and at San Diego Comic-Con he revealed plans for a crossover Django Unchained/Zorro comic, which could be fun. And while he has an affinity for kung-fu flicks, pop culture, and B-movies of all varieties, he’s never expressed much of an interest science fiction. Sure, he’s mentions genre films in his movies now and again, but he’s never talked much about making one of his own, at least until now.
During the Dynamite Comics panel that went down over the weekend at Comic-Con a fan asked the Pulp Fiction director about the possibility of making the jump from gritty westerns and crime pictures to something a little more otherworldly. Here is his response:
If you had asked me a few years ago I would have said, ‘Nah, not really, I don’t know.’ But I have a little idea right now. It’s a little flower, you know, like a bean sprout, but those tend to grow into stalks. So this is the first time I’ll be able to say ‘maybe.’ It won’t be a spaceship sci-fi, it’ll be earthbound… A series that I would like to put a spin on is the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I want to take it from the pod people’s perspective, so you’re actually rooting for the pod people. I don’t think they’re so bad.
This isn’t an imminent thing, so don’t expect to see a Quentin Tarantino-directed sci-fi film in your local theater anytime in the next few years, if this ever actually materializes. Still, the idea is definitely an intriguing one. Like he says, this is the first time the subject has ever really come up, and he’s obviously been giving it at least some thought.
And of course, Tarantino would want to make a pod-people movie from their point of view. This is, after all, a man who has made fans empathize with criminals, murderers, outlaws, and miscreants of all varieties over the years. Hell, when John Travolta blows off Marvin’s head in Samuel L. Jackson’s car in Pulp Fiction, you, like the character, are more concerned that they may get pulled over than with the fact he killed a guy in the back seat.
If nothing else, this would give Tarantino an opportunity to reference all kinds of obscure sci-fi films that can only be found on grainy, bootleg VHS tapes, or something like that. We’re talking visually, with character names, and in dialogue, he could go crazy and take his films in a direction he’s never gone before. Can’t you just picture the sharp, fast-paced conversations full of allusions and oblique mentions of random science fiction movies? That sounds like it could be a fun time to us. This was even on our Christmas wish-list last year.
Are you interested in seeing Tarantino maybe, possibly, some day far down the road, make a sci-fi film?
