Christopher Nolan admires Quentin Tarantino’s approach to how he plans to bow out of his filmmaking career.
Speaking on the “ReelBlend” podcast (via CinemaBlend), the “Oppenheimer” director addressed Tarantino’s plans to retire after his 10th and final film. Tarantino has said his last feature will be “The Movie Critic,” set in 1970s Los Angeles. Tarantino has long said he will stop after 10 movies, meaning he will be just over 60 years old when he closes his career. Meanwhile, Scorsese is about to release his latest movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” at the age of 80 and has no plans to stop.
“The truth is, I understand both points of view,” Nolan said of the filmmakers’ disparate approaches to aging and filmmaking. “It’s addictive to tell stories in cinema. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s very fun. It’s something you feel driven to do, and so it’s a little hard to imagine voluntarily stopping.”
Nolan said that Tarantino is “never specific about the films he’s talking about or whatever, but he’s looking at some of the work done by filmmakers in later years and feeling that if it can’t live up to the heyday, it would be better if it didn’t exist. And I think that’s a very purist point of view. It’s the point of view of a cinephile who prizes film history.”
When initially asked about Tarantino’s retirement, Nolan turned it back to the podcasters: “Do you believe him?”
As for his own career, Nolan added, “I’m not sure that I would trust my own sense of the absolute value of a piece of work to know whether or not it should have been brought into existence. I’m a big fan, as is Quentin, of films that maybe don’t fully achieve what they try to, but there’s something in there that’s a performance, or a little structural thing, or a scene, you know, that’s wonderful. And so, yes, I understand. I think [I] wanted to keep a sort of perfect reputation of something, but also kind of don’t want to take anything off the table.”
Tarantino previously explained that he does not want to slip in the quality of his features and hopes to end with a great final movie.
“It’s just time to go out. I like the idea of going out on top,” Tarantino said earlier this year. “I like the idea of giving it my all for 30 years and then saying, ‘OK, that’s enough.’ And I don’t like working to diminishing returns. And I mean, now is a good time because I mean, what even is a motion picture anyway anymore? Is it just something that they show on Apple? That would be diminishing returns.”
In contrast, Scorsese has mused about his own mortality and wishes to continue to make movies for as long as possible.
“I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time,” the “Killers of the Flower Moon” director said at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival press conference. “The whole world has opened up to me, but it’s too late. It’s too late. I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time.”
Scorsese added, “Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, ‘I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.’ He was 83. At the time, I said, ‘What does he mean?’ Now I know what he means.”
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