Quentin Tarantino has shelved plans for a “Star Trek” movie he was developing but now details have been revealed from the planned script…
Back in 2017, Quentin Tarantino pitched J.J. Abrams on an idea he had for an “R’ rated “Star Trek” movie that he could direct after loving the science-fiction franchise from afar for many years.
The chance to have an Oscar winner like Tarantino on board for a “Star Trek” film seemed like a dream too good to be true so Paramount immediately started working on developing the project for the writer and director.
Soon after, Robert L. Smith — the screenwriter behind the Academy Award winning film “The Revenant” — was brought on to collaborate with Tarantino on a script for the “Star Trek” movie. Sadly, Tarantino eventually moved on from the project with his current focus on his new novelization of “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” before eventually moving onto what he says will be his 10th and final film.
That said, Smith recently revealed some details behind those meetings he held with Tarantino as they started plotting out a script for his original idea for the franchise.
“They just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up’. And I said, ‘Yeah,'” Smith told the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast. “And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.”
According to Smith, he then started traveling to Tarantino’s house where they would watch movies together as inspiration as they continued developing this idea for a “Star Trek” movie.
Tarantino had the overall plot already developed and Smith says it would have involved the entire “Star Trek” cast but most importantly Captain Kirk as played by Chris Pine, who the “Pulp Fiction” filmmaker has raved about as one of his favorite actors in past interviews.
“Then just we started working. I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films,” Smith said. “We were there for hours… We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys.
“I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. There’s all this other… it’s really wild.”
Eventually, Tarantino moved on from his idea for a “Star Trek” movie while focusing on the birth of his first son and relocating to Israel, which is where he now lives full time with his wife and child.
More recently, Tarantino returned to the states to promote his book for “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” and he’s talked about another film review book he’s currently plotting for the future as well.
As for his final film, Tarantino isn’t putting a deadline on when that might happen but he’s adamant that his next movie will be his last, although he’s promised to continue creating in other ways — just not behind the camera any longer.
