Caffeinated Clint
Quentin Tarantino is a huge “Star Trek” fan [apparently] – so big in fact that he approached Paramount (not the other way around) about scripting a film within those “strange new worlds” Kirk and co famously travel to each and every week – or every film.
At the time, there were reports his idea involved the crew of J.J Abrams’ three “Trek” films (Chris Pine and company) being caught up in a “Pulp Fiction”-like yarn set in space. It was even said to be a violent, R-rated “Trek” – if one can imagine such a thing?
It doesn’t sound like it’s happening- not at the moment anyway; Paramount have this “Trek” movie on the docket next- so we might never see this logline come to life but some small details about QT’s film have now emerged. And it’s cool. Slushie cool.
Writer Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), the writer hired to pen Tarantino’s idea on paper, tells the “Bulletproof Screenwriting” podcast (via Total Film) that J.J Abrams’ company roped him into the gig.
“They just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’” the screenwriter said. “And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.”
“Then just we started working,” Smith continued. “I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films. We were there for hours. … We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. … It’s really wild.”
No surprise that the cast of the Abrams’ trilogy would return for Tarantino’s film, the filmmaker telling MTV, “I thought Chris Pine did a fantastic job not just playing Capt. Kirk but playing William Shatner’s captain — he is William Shatner. He’s not just another guy, he’s William Shatner’s Capt. Kirk. And Zachary Quinto is literally Leonard Nimoy’s — because they both have the same scene together — he’s his Spock. They fucking nail it. They just nail it.”
Fingers crossed Paramount gets this on their do-to card.
