Back in December 2017, it was announced that director Quentin Tarantino was considering developing an R-rated Star Trek movie alongside Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot, which he described as “Pulp Fiction in space.”
Now, in an interview on the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast (via TotalFilm), The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who was set to co-write the film, has explained how he became involved with the project.
“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’. 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.”
Smith continued to provide some details on the Star Trek project including how the story was going to implement time travel and was set to feature Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew.
“Then just we started working. I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films. 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.”
Previous reports had suggested that Tarantino’s Trek would have been “based on an episode of the classic Star Trek series that takes place largely earthbound in a 1930s gangster setting”, presumably referring to the season two episode ‘A Piece of the Action’.
Four years later, it seems like the project has been scrapped especially since the filmmaker is continuing to insist that he either has one movie left before his retirement or may retire earlier than expected to avoid a “fucking lousy” last movie. Meanwhile, Paramount recently tapped WandaVision director Matt Shakman to helm the next instalment in the Star Trek movie franchise.
