Quentin Tarantino spoke to The Big Picture Podcast (via The Playlist) to promote his novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. During that chat, the filmmaker revealing that around the time of his Grindhouse double-feature experiment (Death Proof and Planet Terror) flopped at the box office he was offered a couple of IP projects such as DC Comics film Sgt. Rock and Westworld remake that was being written by Billy Ray. The latter would have been Tarantino’s first entry into the sci-fi genre before attempting to get a Star Trek film together with the help of Mark L. Smith (The Revenant).
If you’re not familiar with Westworld, it was an original film that was released back in 1973 and was written/directed by author Michael Crichton, who is best known as the writer of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. It focuses on a futuristic theme park with realistic robots that exist to be killed and screwed by guests, that’s until the robots malfunction and start killing their human guests.
Westworld is a futuristic theme park where paying guests can pretend to be gunslingers in an artificial Wild West populated by androids. After paying a sizable entrance fee, Blane (James Brolin) and Martin (Richard Benjamin) are determined to unwind by hitting the saloons and shooting off their guns. But when the system goes haywire and Blane is killed in a duel with a robotic gunslinger (Yul Brynner), Martin’s escapist fantasy suddenly takes on a grim reality.
The project eventually was remade at HBO as a series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, it’s heading into it’s fourth season.
Billy Ray is certainly a competent screenwriter with credits such as The Comey Rule, Richard Jewell, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games, State of Play, and the Bad Robot WWII horror movie Overlord.
Quentin Tarantino plans on retiring from feature film directing after making his 10th movie, but has yet to announce that will be and has working on a Bounty Law mini-series that will likely be next for him.
SOURCE: THE BIG PICTURE PODCAST
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