10 Weirdest Movies Quentin Tarantino Actually Wanted To Make
He called it "Pulp Fiction in Space"
As directors go, Quentin Tarantino has always been a little on the peculiar side, with his idiosyncratic writing style, dialogue quirks, and even a self-imposed rule that he will retire from filmmaking altogether after only ten movies.
With nine of those already in the can and only one space remaining, it's a better time than ever to speculate on just what exactly it might be. And while Tarantino's next move has never been easy to predict, we might be able to get a better understanding of what his next crazy idea might be if we take a look back on some of the equally unpredictable unmade movie ideas he's hinted about making over his long movie career.
While there's no guarantee that any of them will ever see the light of day, some are just so outright bizarre you might just want them to.
10. A Kung-Fu Film Written Entirely In Mandarin
If there's one thing Inglourious Basterds proves, it's that Tarantino's never been afraid to veer outside of the English language. Only thirty percent of that film was written in his native tongue, with the vast majority of the script devoted to French, German, and even a little Italian.
Following on from the success of his Kill Bill films however, themselves an eclectic mix of English, Japanese, Cantonese, Spanish and French, Tarantino began to consider a new Kung-Fu follow-up that pushed this linguistic obsession one step further. Inspired by Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers after seeing it at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, Quentin began work on a second homage to the genre - one to be written entirely in Mandarin.
"He's spent a year and a half learning to make that kind of martial arts movie," Tarantino said about Yimou's film, "So what does he want to do? Make another one. That sh*t just made sense to me."
Tarantino planned on releasing two simultaneous theatrical cuts of the movie, one with subtitles, and another with an out-of-sync English language track, similar to the old-school re-dubs of the seventies. It was unclear whether Tarantino planned to hire real Mandarin speakers, or train Hollywood actors to learn the language, as he did before.
Whether we'll ever hear about this ambitious idea again, or whether any executive would even be brave enough to fund it is still impossible to say, although with how much money Inglourious Basterds ended up making at the box office, who knows?