Last month came the announcement that “WandaVision” helmer Matt Shakman had closed a deal to direct the next “Star Trek” film, one that would continue the ‘Kelvin Timeline’ with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock.
That news ended years of seeming uncertainty on the part of Paramount over the film arm of the ‘Trek’ franchise. Prior to that, the studio had at least two other ‘Trek’ films in development – one from “Fargo” showrunner Noah Hawley that had a plague theme, and one that Quentin Tarantino and “The Revenant” scribe Mark L. Smith were working on.
Speaking on the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast (via TotalFilm) recently, Smith discussed his experience working with Tarantino and what the famed auteur’s vision was that the script aimed to bring to life. From the sounds of it, the reports of it being a an “R-rated gangster movie” a while back weren’t far off:
“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.’ 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. 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. There’s all this other… it’s really wild.”
The details sound akin to the classic series episode “A Piece of the Action” which involves Kirk & Spock on a planet inspired by 1920s & 1930s Prohibition-era Chicago. Tarantino made it clear not that long ago however that he and Smith’s “Star Trek” film is essentially dead.
