Quentin Tarantino Says His Star Trek Movie Will Absolutely Be 'Pulp Fiction' in Space
As soon as we found out that Quentin Tarantino pitched an idea for a Star Trek movie to JJ Abrams nearly two years ago, the fan-fiction pretty much wrote itself: Pulp Fiction in space.
But, it turns out that, it might actually not be too far off from that. In an interview with Deadline, Tarantino was talking about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when his in-development Star Trek project came up:
“I get annoyed at Simon Pegg. He doesn’t know anything about what’s going on and he keeps making all these comments as if he knows about stuff. One of the comments he said, he’s like “Well, look, it’s not going to be Pulp Fiction in space.” Yes, it is! [laughs hard]. If I do it, that’s exactly what it’ll be. It’ll be Pulp Fiction in space. That Pulp Fiction-y aspect, when I read the script, I felt, I have never read a science fiction movie that has this shit in it, ever. There’s no science fiction movie that has this in it.”
Tarantino added that The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith “wrote a really cool script,” and made it clear that if he does make this Star Trek movie it will absolutely be in his own style.
If I’m going to do it, then I’m going to do it my way. If you’ve seen my nine movies, you kind of know my way is an R-rated way and a way that is without certain restrictions. So that goes part and parcel. I think it would be more controversial if I said I’m going to do a PG movie and it’s going to fit exactly in the universe. It’s not me. What the fuck am I doing? I mean I didn’t even do that when I did that CSI episode.
The thing is, when I talked to JJ about it, it’s not that radical. We’re just not worrying about stuff like that. JJ said, “Quentin, I love this idea because I think with Star Trek we can go any way we want to.” Look, I’ve got a situation. As long as Paramount likes the idea and the script they almost got nothing to lose right now when it comes to Star Trek. Deadpool showed that you can rethink these things, do them in a different way. So really, even before JJ knew what the idea was, his feeling was, if it wants to be an R rating, fine. If it wants to be the Wild Bunch in space, fine.
Thankfully, he was enthusiastic about what was probably the best part of the last three Star Trek features—Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto’s performances as Kirk and Spock, respectively, saying, “Those two guys, they fucking got it.”
Tarantino has repeatedly said he’ll retire after he directs his tenth film, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood marks his ninth work—and it seems like if he does direct Star Trek, he’ll stick to that number. Earlier in the week, he told CinemaBlend: “I actually think, if I was going to do Star Trek, I should commit to it. It's my last movie. There should be nothing left handed about it. I don't know if I'm going to do that, but that might happen.”
So we might not get Jules and Vincent flinging around on the Starship Enterprise for two-and-a-half hours, force-feeding burgers to the Klingons—but hey, the idea of Kirk phasing aliens so hard that they fly halfway across a planet is pretty exciting too.
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