“I’m not a hired hand”

Quentin Tarantino’s got a new book coming out—Cinema Speculation, a non-fiction deep dive into his favorite films that sounds like pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Tarantino tackling that particular topic, for good or ill—which means that we’ve also got a whole new crop of Quentin Tarantino interviews to get through, too. That includes, unsurprisingly, the writer-director’s take on the dominant blockbuster form of the day, the omnipresent, inescapable superhero movie, which he talked about recently with The Los Angeles Times.

Tarantino starts by comparing superhero movies to the studio musicals that filled out the rosters of many of the big production houses back in the late 1960s, saying they’ve got a similar “chokehold” on the industry, and stating that today’s directors, “can’t wait for the day” that they can declare comic book films similarly dead. When asked why he hasn’t directed one himself, Tarantino gave pretty much exactly the answer you might expect: “You have to be a hired hand to do those things. I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”

Disappointingly, writer Glenn Whipp does not seem to go on to ask Tarantino about the very weird recent blip in his non-hired-hand career, i.e., that bit where it really sounded like he was going to make a Star Trek movie for Paramount. (He does talk quite a bit about Star Wars in the interview, although he makes it clear he’s less excited about it than, say, Jaws.) We remain endlessly fascinated by this idea—reminder, it’s the one where Quentin Tarantino would have apparently made a gangster movie set in the Star Trek universe—mostly because it seems like such a weird fit for a guy who’s always been very careful not to get subsumed into the studio machine. Alas, that project has since fallen by the wayside—and it sounds like Quentin Tarantino’s West Coast Avengers isn’t any closer to leaping out of our minds and into the real world, either.