It has been an oft-discussed topic ever since Quentin Tarantino announced his plan to retire after his tenth movie. Will he really stop? And is that the right idea? Doing the math, if Sir Ridley Scott stopped making movies at 10, he wouldn’t have made Gladiator. Unthinkable. What movies will Tarantino leave on the table if he walks away? At the same time, Martin Scorsese recently opened up about the weight of time that he’s starting to feel, knowing that he wants to keep telling stories, but he knows he’s getting old. Which side does Christopher Nolan fall on? The Oppenheimer director, similar to Tarantino, has a remarkable body of work. Does he want to keep going and possibly jeopardize ending his career on a dud?
The chances of that happening are slim. Even when he has dipped into the superhero genre, Nolan made some of the best Batman movies ever created. But he prefers working on original material like Tenet or Interstellar. With Oppenheimer on the way, Mr. Nolan joined our ReelBlend podcast and we started discussing Tarantino’s plan to retire. “Do you believe him?” Nolan fired back. The ReelBlend hosts disagree. We’re split on it. But as Nolan opened up, and brought Scorsese into the mix, he told us:
The truth is, I understand both points of view. 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. But I also see … Quentin's point has always been that – and he never, very graciously, he's 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 purest point of view. It's the point of view of a cinephile who prizes film history.
Right now, depending on who you ask, Quentin Tarantino has a resume of bangers. You might like some of his best movies more than others. But his body of work will go down in history as an all-timer. And Tarantino has said that he has seen enough filmmakers who he has adored continue to make films in their later years and slide off. He’d rather that doesn’t happen to him.
And Christopher Nolan understands that point of view. He’s just not sure he subscribes to it. As he went on to say on ReelBlend:
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.
All of us would like to see Chris Nolan and Quentin Tarantino make movies into their 70s and 80s. They both understand more about film than we’ll ever know. Which is why when Tarantino picks the greatest movie of all time, we sit up and listen. And when a new Nolan movie, like Oppenheimer, hits theaters, they are events. Make sure you listen to the entire Nolan interview on this episode of ReelBlend:
It’s going to get very busy at the movie theater, with Indiana Jones, Ethan Hunt, Barbie, and J. Oppenheimer asking for your attention. Keep track of all the Upcoming 2023 movies with our guide, and enjoy!
