Having already paid homage to martial arts, revenge, slasher, Japanese and road-rage movies, Tarantino is also planning a new genre, a form of spaghetti western set in America's Deep South which he calls "a southern".
"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done," he says. "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. 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.
"But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it. So maybe that's the next mountain waiting for me."
(Full Telegraph interview here. Can I just say I love that headline? I would get in piles of trouble if I tried to write a headline like that! British papers are so ballsy sometimes, I swear, it makes me dizzy.)
Anyway, I agree with GAoH that this is a rotten idea. Tarantino may have been born in Tennessee, but he cannot actually believe America, and the South in particular, haven't explored their "horrible past with slavery and stuff." I'm imagining a horrible fusion of "Borat" and the "Kill Bill" movies - which were fine, but were exactly like being buttonholed at a party by a guy who's got good anecdotes but never stops to ask for your opinion. The South has to deal with outsiders' stupid preconceptions all the time. Tarantino is the last thing it needs.
3 comments:
I've been thinking about this last night and today, and still haven't figured out a way that the film wouldn't be a terrible disaster. Which is a shame, because I enjoy Kill Bill (took me a while, but I like it a lot now) and other Tarantino flicks, but they do work so well in part because he is so great in grittier urban settings. Also, they don't tend to deal with big social issues...
I can't recall a lot of spaghetti westerns that dealt with large societal issues, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough. Perhaps he means making an action movie starring a slave which I suppose might fit his description and could be non-terrible. Tarantino tends to be more grandiose than the situation often calls for, so who knows what (or if) he's actually thinking.
I don't know what he means ... something starring a slave or some "Dogville" type business. I just don't think his slick, talky style will tell the South anything it doesn't already know.
Aw, hell no!
Back off Tarantino!
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