Quentin Tarantino Announces Film History Book ‘Cinema Speculation’ Coming This Fall

Christian Zilko
·2 min read
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Quentin Tarantino still has not announced any plans to shoot his final movie, but cinephiles can look forward to some new work from the “Pulp Fiction” director this fall. Tarantino is writing a new book on film history titled “Cinema Speculation,” and his publisher HarperCollins has announced that it will be ready for an October 25 release.

The book’s official synopsis from HarperCollins reads: “in addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with ‘Cinema Speculation,’ the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans — and all movie lovers — could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.”

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Tarantino’s interest in writing books is nothing new. He has always been adamant that he will retire from filmmaking after making 10 movies (he’s currently at nine), and that he sees writing books as a way to stay creative when he’s no longer behind the camera. He recently adapted his film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” into a novel, which IndieWire gave an ebullient B+ to in our review.

Previously, Tarantino had written that he’d planned a separate novel about a WWII veteran who returns home and finds refuge in international cinema after no longer responding to Hollywood, given all he’d been through. “I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there,” Tarantino said of his other upcoming novel. “And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini.”

But fans found out that that book was in fact the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” novel, where that returning veteran character who finds a home at the arthouse is none other than Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in the movie. The role won Pitt an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

“Cinema Speculation” will hit bookstore shelves on October 25, 2022.

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