(Credit: Far Out / Alamy / Press)
Quentin Tarantino will make his return to the big screen with his next movie, The Movie Critic, which will go into pre-production next month. However, the director has admitted that he does not want the lead role to go to a British actor despite there being a swathe of talent coming out of the United Kingdom.
In a new interview with Deadline, Tarantino said, “No,” he said empathetically. “The truth of the matter is, yes, obviously, a Brit could pull it off, but I don’t want to cast a Brit. Obviously, nothing against the Brits, but we’re living in a really weird time now.”
He added: “I think when people look back on this era of cinema, and it’s just all these British actors pretending to be Americans and all these Australian actors pretending to be Americans, it’s like phantoms. Nobody is acting in their own voice. We just happen to be in an era of really, really good British actors who, for the most part, can pull it off.”
Tarantino is keen to stress that he doesn’t hold anything against British actors, though, noting, “By the way, I’m not being xenophobic. The Brits would have a hell of a lot more problems if a bunch of American actors came over there with their Dick Van Dyke [Mary Poppins] accents playing famous Brits. They don’t want to see that shit.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, the director revealed that The Movie Critic will be about a man who wrote for a “porno rag” in 1977 California.
Detailing further, Tarantino said his upcoming film “is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag”.
Speaking to the publication, Tarantino states that, as well as his time working in a video rental store, he also spent time as a teenager loading porn magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” the filmmaker stated, revealing that his new film would be about the mysterious individual who wrote for the undisclosed magazine.
