Last year we spoke to Simon Pegg about Quentin Tarantino’s potential Star Trek film for Paramount, and now in a new interview with Deadline Tarantino actually responds directly to something from that interview!
“I will say one thing about Star Trek that I’ve been waiting for someone to bring up,” said Tarantino. “I don’t know if I’ll do it or not. I’ve got to figure it out, but Mark wrote a really cool script. I like it a lot. There’s some things I need to work on but I really, really liked it. I get annoyed at Simon Pegg. He doesn’t know anything about what’s going on and he keeps making all these comments as if he knows about stuff. One of the comments he said, he’s like ‘Well, look, it’s not going to be Pulp Fiction in space.’ Yes, it is! [laughs hard]. If I do it, that’s exactly what it’ll be. It’ll be Pulp Fiction in space. That Pulp Fiction-y aspect, when I read the script, I felt, I have never read a science fiction movie that has this sh*t in it, ever. There’s no science fiction movie that has this in it. And they said, I know, that’s why we want to make it. It’s, at the very least, unique in that regard… But there is a gangster element to what we’re doing with the Star Trek thing that works out pretty good.”
The “Pulp Fiction in space” quote Tarantino is referring to actually came from an interview we at ComingSoon.net did with Simon Pegg a year ago!
“Everyone sort of assumes it’s gonna be like ‘Pulp Fiction’ in space, but I think his devotion to ‘Trek’ and his understanding of it… It won’t be ordinary, it’ll have him all over it, but it won’t be anything a ‘Star Trek’ fan will have to worry about,” Pegg said of Tarntino’s Trek. “He has an acute understanding of the story and he’d never do anything to tear it down. I haven’t read the treatment yet, but I might be able to in the next couple of weeks, so I’m excited about that.”
Said script was written by Mark L. Smith, who penned The Revenant. Smith came aboard the project in December of 2017, after which talk of Tarantino’s Star Trek all but ceased while he worked on finishing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
As previously reported, the new take on the Enterprise will shoot for an R rating, a notion that has irked some of Star Trek’s core fanbase. However, last year actor Karl Urban, who plays Dr. McCoy in the newer films, explained that the movie would not earn the harder rating via vulgarity or language, but rather through more gritty realism.
“You shouldn’t worry that it is going to be full of obscenity and stuff,” Urban said. “He wants an R-rating to really make those beats of consequence land. If it’s not PG, if someone gets sucked out into space, which we have all seen before, we might see them get disemboweled first…It allows some some breadth…gives him some leeway to do that.”
Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood opens in theaters on July 26.
