Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino said he has been working on a comedic stage play, marking a significant career shift for one of the world’s most celebrated directors.
The Django Unchained director revealed his theatrical ambitions during a nearly two-hour appearance on an episode of Club Random with Bill Maher released on Sunday.
Since his last film, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has released a novelization of that film and a book of film criticism. Plans to start shooting his tenth and final feature, The Movie Critic, were put on hold in April.
The aspiring playwright commented on the rumor mill created by the entertainment press.
“The thing that was kind of funny about The Movie Critic was they started saying that I was going to cast that actor Paul Walter Hauser. I think they just think he looks like a critic,” Tarantino told Maher with a laugh.
“They write it in ‘Showbiz Weekly,’ or whatever, and that gets picked up in a 140 pieces,” he said. “Now, because I’m not shutting that down because I’m not all connected, then that’s just reported as if it’s true and it’s true for a couple of weeks because no one knows anything better. Because I’m not filling them in.”
“It's not a bad thing. … The egomaniac in me thinks that the idea that 142 articles can be printed about just speculation of what I’m gonna do, I appreciate that a lot. That means I’m in a good place,” Taratino added with a laugh.
“Yeah, what about the two Oscars that you have and how lonely they are, and how they cry at night wanting a third sibling?” Maher asked, referencing the awards the director received for original screenplays for 1994’s Pulp Fiction and 2012’s Django Unchained.
“I’m leaning more towards writing right now – trying for a while, anyway – theater. And in theater, it would be funny stuff,” he said.
“Theater?” Maher replied. “I can’t go to the theater. Make a movie.”
“Well, if it’s a popular play, then I’ll probably make a movie,” Tarantino said.
When explaining the alure of writing for the stage, he said, “In a comedy play, the audience is a character in the room. … [it’s] almost like a live animal in the room.”
“When that works, that’s an evening out,” he added. “That was funny, there was a reason why I was in that room and there was an interplay between the actors. That’s really hard to capture on film. That could be something really, really special.”
Tarantino also spoke of “the joy of seeing different actors” playing the same role over time.
“In a play, no actor owns that role,” he said. “Someone else would do the London show, and somebody else would do the tour. And then colleges and high schools could do it later.”
Though Tarantino has never written for the stage, he did briefly try his hand at acting on Broadway over 25 years ago.
In 1998, the auteur joined Marisa Tomei for a revival of Wait Until Dark, which ran for 16 weeks at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
Tarantino was stung by the negative reviews he received for his performance.
“I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003. “It was not about the play—it was about me, and at a certain point I started getting too thin a skin about the constant criticism. It started getting to me. It’s f---ed up when people make fun of you.”
