Quentin Tarantino Is Writing The Basterds Prequel, But It Isn't His Next Movie

One of the great things about Inglourious Basterds getting loads of critic association awards is that Quentin Tarantino is still out talking to people, and naturally he's talking about his next possible projects. (Talking is still what Tarantino does best.) So, what does the director's 2010 calendar have in store, at least as he envisions it this week?

Talk of a prequel to Inglourious Basterds continues, and in an interview with Vulture Tarantino says he's got forty pages written. Which is a start, I guess, but further comments suggest that that pages might be all he does for a while.

Vulture paraphrases Tarantino saying that his next film will be something else entirely, a "smaller, less epic" film in a "different genre entirely." Not that much to go on, but QT says that five or six months of intensive writing should be enough to polish off the script. That's a far cry from the few weeks it took to write Basterds, but he'd been thinking about that one for a decade.

I'm hoping he keeps the energy to move fast on this one. There's a lot of momentum behind the guy now, and if Basterds cleans up at the Oscars — not impossible by any means — he'll gain even more. Then again, if Basterds takes a few really big awards he might have more incentive to push forward on the prequel.

And there are the further film(s) in the Kill Bill storyline, but he's already said those won't be next. The less epic scale of this new script suggests, however, that it isn't his long-rumored Western, nor the '30s gangster picture he's talked about in the last year.  I can't see him making either of those on a small scale. (Though obviously it's not impossible by any means. A tidy little Western from the director would be fantastic.)

In other words: speculation! But hey, we like talking about Tarantino almost as he likes talking about himself.