Quentin Tarantino would have made “the best Star Trek film”: “It was stupid!”

The screenplay was co-written by Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter of The Revenant.

Quentin Tarantino was on the verge of making a science fiction film, and part of the franchise Star Trek, Furthermore. You imagine ? Captain Kirk dropping “fuck” at all costs or even Spock smoking aliens while maintaining his legendary phlegm! Even if this whole idea gave rise to many fantasies, it is yet another aborted project which will remain on the dusty shelves of Paramount.

Asked by Colliderthe screenwriter of the Revenant Mark L. Smithwho was in charge of writing the project with other authors – including Lindsey Anderson Beer, known for Godzilla vs. Kong- returned to its creation… and its abandonment. He first recalls that if QT did not write the script himself, he called on trusted authors by commissioning them in person to define the tone of the film he dreamed of shooting.

“It was a completely different story that Quentin wanted to tell and it suited my sensibilities, he says. So I wrote it, Quentin and I worked on it, he brought a few things of his own, then he started to worry about the number of films he was going to make.”

Indeed, it’s no longer a secret, all of Hollywood and the film-loving community know that Quentin Tarantino decided to retire after his tenth film, which happens to be in development. Mark L. Smith says that the filmmaker wondered if Star Trek could be his last achievement for the cinema and part of his overall work.

The screenwriter supposes that this is the answer to the abandonment of the project Star Trek by Tarantino : “I think that’s the obstacle he was never able to overcome, so the script is still there on his desk.” The filmmaker could not imagine this film in his overall body of work and, apparently, certainly not as his last film before his retirement. This abandonment is not without regret on the part of the two collaborators: “I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love to see that happen. It’s just one of those I never see happening. But it would be the greatest film Star Trek, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was going to do with it. It was just super ballsy.“

Quentin Tarantino had ‘passionate ideas’ for his Star Trek film

Without being able to reveal details concerning the plot of this film, under penalty of being “kill” by Tarantino, Mark L. Smith nevertheless describes the project as close to pulp Fiction in its treatment of violence. “I think his vision was to go all out. It was a hard R”, he said in reference to the American category of age restriction “R” attributed to films prohibited for minors without the accompaniment of an adult. A pure film of Tarantino in short. “It was the kind of violence pulp Fiction (…) it would have been cool”, he adds.

We can also assume that it could have been about time travel, the filmmaker having previously revealed that his favorite episodes of the whole saga Star Trek were as follows: City On The Edge Forever (Setbacks in VF), from the original series with William Shatner And Leonard Nimoy (1967), and Yesterday’s Enterprise (The Company will come from yesterday) of The new generationthe series started at the end of the 1980s with Patrick Stewart.

Even if this film Star Trek will probably never see the light of day, QT fans can still rejoice that he still has one film left to make to conclude his decade. This film is called The Movie Critic and will be led by Paul Walter Hauser in the role of a film critic in 1970s Los Angeles. It is scheduled to be filmed in 2024.

Paul Walter Hauser, hero of Quentin Tarantino’s final film?