Quentin Tarantino has been saying for years now that he intends to retire from filmmaking after putting 10 movies on his personal scorecard, of which, this summer’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood would be the ninth. And while there have been jokes about him quitting early—or slightly more serious suggestions of slipping a “doesn’t count” Star Trek movie in there somewhere down the line—he reiterated his commitment to that number during an interview this weekend.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Tarantino was in Moscow this weekend for Once Upon A Time’s Russian premiere, where he reaffirmed that, not only would his next “official” Tarantino movie be his last, but that it would probably take its own “lastness” into account. “I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y,” he noted when asked about his self-imposed cutoff, although he didn’t go into any more detail on what that film might entail. (Our guess: Every survivor from every film—or their descendants—gets trapped in a Red Apple cigarette factory, at which point they end up in so many different Mexican standoffs in such rapid succession that their arms all fall off from overuse.)
Even more interestingly, Tarantino noted that said concerns about his oncoming retirement also informed Once Upon A Time, which he characterized as a sort of climax point for his entire career: “If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story and each film is like a train boxcar connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big show-stopping climax of it all,” he noted in regards to his latest film (Which we can kind of see; not just because the film is, itself, about making movies, but because it incorporates certain plot and stylistic elements from all his films that have come before.)