Tarantino's Tenth Script Waits for the Director to Change

Quentin Tarantino has finished his tenth and final film script. He's not making it yet because he wants to live a little first.

This has happened before. David Fincher completed the screenplay for "Gone Girl" in 2011 and waited a year, citing life priorities — he wanted to be present for his family, to step away from production's all-consuming machinery. When he finally shot in 2012, Fincher had lived through a marriage that functioned differently than the one he'd written about. The director who inhabited the script had changed.

The script remained unchanged on paper. "Gone Girl" registers as something Fincher had not just conceived but survived, which gave its portrait of a marriage its suffocating, recognized accuracy. A year of actual marriage life had marinated the material in a way no amount of pre-production could have.

A completed script is theoretical — you have solved all the problems you can solve on the page. What remains is whether you have lived enough to understand what you wrote. The delay is not procrastination in Tarantino's case or Fincher's. It is a gamble on the bet that the filmmaker will become someone different. That time will season the material by changing the person who has to execute it.

Tarantino at fifty-eight is not the Tarantino who wrote his first feature at twenty-eight. What shifts is not the text but the filmmaker's capacity to recognize what the text contains. If the script is genuinely his tenth and final statement, then whether he needs those months of theatre and distance to discover what he actually wrote matters most. Most people who say they need time to live before completing something important discover that the time reveals the thing was already finished. They just needed to become the person capable of seeing it. The risk is finishing so completely that you recognize there's nothing left to say. That recognition lands differently depending on what you've done in the year before.