Quentin Tarantino has written every single movie he has directed, but he has also written three that he didn’t get to direct – here’s why. Tarantino’s career as a writer and filmmaker began in 1992 with the crime movie Pulp Fiction.
Those first movies firmly established Tarantino’s visual and narrative style, along with his trademark doses of violence, and opened many doors for him in the movie industry. Tarantino has famously stated he will retire after making 10 movies, but when taking into all those he has written, he has already ed that number – the trick here is, he hasn’t directed every single movie he has written. Instead, Tarantino has left the director chair to three different filmmakers to bring his stories to life, though he didn’t always like the final result.
First off is The script for True Romance, then, was sold and landed on Tony Scott’s hands, who changed the non-linear narrative into a more traditional one, but according to Tarantino, the final result was very faithful to his original screenplay. However, the ending was changed, and while Tarantino wasn’t initially on board with that, after watching the movie he agreed that this ending was more appropriate to the movie Scott made.
Next was From Dusk till Dawn was released, directed by Tarantino’s friend Robert Rodriguez, and with Tarantino playing the character of Richie Gecko. In the early 1990s, Robert Kutzman hired Tarantino to write the script as his first paid writing assignment, and Tarantino was reportedly set to direct it but decided to focus on the story and playing Richie Gecko instead. After that, other directors were interested in bringing the story to life, but the big winner was Robert Rodriguez.
Funny enough, True Romance and From Dusk till Dawn are both considered as part of the “Tarantino movie universe”, with the former being part of the “realer than real” level and the latter of the “movie-in-a-movie” side, meaning that Clarence and Alabama watched the Gecko brothers fight some vampires at the cinema. It’s unknown if there are other Quentin Tarantino scripts that could potentially be directed by someone else, but it seems unlikely that would happen now as he’s already a big name in the film industry and can get the budget and everything he needs to make any movie he wants.
