Yesterday people got pretty excited (myself included) at the idea Quentin Tarantino was preparing to direct an as yet untitled spaghetti western and that his Inglourious Basterds star and Oscar winner, Christoph Waltz would be joining the helmer once again.
Details were scarce and it had the strong sent of rumor as a new Tarantino project seems to be announced every three months or so, but today Deadline adds their two cents to the fray. Here’s what they had to say:
I ran into Quentin Tarantino, who said that he has completed the script for his Western, and that compared to recent scripts like Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill that took so long to crystallize, this one came together much quicker and just flowed out of him. He wasn’t more descriptive than that before I lost him in the crowd, but my understanding is he’ll deliver within two months and then [The Weinstein Co.] will begin moving toward a production start.
Over at The Playlist they mined the history of Tarantino rumors for possible ideas as to what this could be and the first thing that came up was a 2007 interview he did with The Telegraph when he laid out plans for a pic on America’s past with slavery, but he wanted to do it in the style of a spaghetti western.
“I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies,” he said. “I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”
Next is a 2009 interview with the New York Times in which he suggested a possible Inglourious Basterds sequel dealing with similar subject matter, “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell.” So this is a subject obviously on his mind and American abolitionist John Brown (Wikipedia) seems to be his taking off point.
Tarantino told Charlie Rose in August of 2009, “There is one [biopic] story that I could be interested in, but it would probably be one of the last movies I [ever make]. My favorite hero in American history is John Brown. He’s my favorite American who ever lived. He basically single-handedly started the road to end slavery and the fact that he killed people to do it. He decided, ‘If we start spilling white blood, then they’re going to start getting the idea.'”
Finally, in talking with the New York Daily News last February he seems to have brought all of this together:
“I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it A Southern.”
I know that’s a lot to chew on, but it all comes down to a rather concise premise for what sounds like the film we’ve been hearing about. But it sounds like in the next couple of months all of this will finally crystallize and we’ll get an official announcement.
