If you’ve been looking for a book that’s at least 50 percent swear words, good news—Quentin Tarantino is writing a novel.
The famously profane filmmaker (Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, etc.) revealed his planned foray into literature in a conversation with fellow cursing aficionado Martin Scorsese in DGA Quarterly Magazine.
“Right now, I’m working on a book,” Tarantino said. “And I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through.”
Tarantino goes on to say that his veteran character decides to explore the world of foreign film, watching movies by Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini.
“So now, I find myself having a wonderful opportunity of, in some cases, rewatching and, in some cases, watching for the first time, movies I’ve heard about forever, but from my character’s perspective,” Tarantino explained.
Tarantino has published book editions of his screenplays before, but has never published a novel. But as Complex magazine points out, his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was originally conceived as a novel and then morphed into a screenplay.
Complex also noted that Tarantino has previously said he plans to write novels and stage plays once he’s done with cinema. (Tarantino says…a lot of things, though, so take it all with a grain of salt.)
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
