Back to a time when Quentin Tarantino had to direct a disaster film like the great classics of the genre released in the 1970s.
The year is 2003. Director Quentin Tarantino is busy promoting Kill Bill: Volume 1. Both the film and its sequel – which was not yet released at the time – are influenced by the cinema of the 60s and 80s with which Tarantino grew up and always considered his favorite one of the video clubs and movie theaters of his childhood.
While promoting a film that is partly based on nostalgia for this era of neighborhood cinemas, the director does not hesitate to share a cinematographic genre he would like to try out, that of disaster films from the 1970s like La Tour infernal or The Adventure of the Poseidon.
If he had mentioned this project in a joking tone with a referenced title, “Airport 2005”, echoing Airport (1970), the filmmaker already had his dream cast :
MGM John Travolta
Travolta could play the pilot, Pam Grier the flight attendant, Robert Forster, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Bridget Fonda.
Moreover, the idea in the air of Tarantino gave ideas to others since in 2005 the TV movie The Adventure of the Poseidon was released with Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin and Steve Guttenberg, and the following year, Samuel L Jackson is filming Snakes on the Plane, which as its name suggests confronts a special agent with a release of poisonous snakes on a plane!
New Line Cinema
Samuel L. Jackson in “Snakes on the Plane”
The disaster film was intended precisely in the “seventies” vein desired by Tarantino and had benefited from a fairly significant buzz at the time of its release. Is it for all these reasons or because he rather started with the “Grindhouse” diptych that Airport 2005 by “QT” never saw the light of day? In any case, the project was never mentioned by the director again.
As for the present, it is uncertain for Quentin Tarantino director, because he had sworn that he would only make ten films throughout his career and here he is on the threshold of shooting his last work.
If he is being written for a feature film revolving around the world of film criticism of the 70s, we still do not know if he will not back down at the last moment and entrust it to someone else, to finally devote his final staging to another subject. That being said, with a focus on the 70s after the one on the year 1969 of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, we can say that there would be an idea!