There have been more stories surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s Hard-R Star Trek film then there have been Captain’s Logs, and now writer Mark L. Smith has been speaking about why the director’s ‘Pulp Fiction in space‘ never came to fruition.
The Revenant screenwriter was speaking with Collider about his latest venture, George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat, when talk turned to Trek, a film Smith claims could have been “the greatest ‘Star Trek’ film” had Tarantino not had reservations about it being his much-ballyhooed “final film”.
“Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films,” Smith revealed. “I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that ‘Star Trek’ could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.”
Smith added “I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those things that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest ‘Star Trek’ film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
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“But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence,” Smith said. “Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”
Officially pitched to Paramount Pictures and J.J. Abrams in late 2017, Tarantino’s Trek was set to feature the Chris Pine crew in an adventure based on an episode of the classic Star Trek series that takes place largely earthbound in a 1930s gangster setting. Titled ‘A Piece of the Action’, the fan-favourite episode finds the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise on the planet Sigma Iotia II, a remote world which has modelled itself on the mob setting of 1920s Chicago. A perfect fit for Tarantino’s modus operandi.
Tarantino’s tenth and final outing as a director will therefore be The Movie Critic, and so he joins Noah Hawley and Matt Shakman as directors who weren’t able to get a fourth Star Trek off the ground, although he has offered up his consultancy services should someone decide to pick up that script from his desk.
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