Quentin Tarantino won't necessarily retire after ten films

It's been known for a while now that Quentin Tarantino intends his tenth film to be his last as director; a way, presumably, to preserve a sense of artistic legacy within his oeuvre.

"I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more," Tarantino stated in 2014. "I do think directing is a young man’s game, and I like the idea of an umbilical cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard."

"I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography, and so I’ve got two more to go after this. It’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan. If I get to the 10th, do a good job and don’t screw it up, well that sounds like a good way to end the old career."

Though he admitted then his plans weren't entirely set in stone, it seems as if his perspective may have indeed shifted slightly in the passing years. Speaking to Variety, he re-iterated his ten-year plan but added; "Even if at 75, if I have this other story to tell, it would still kind of work because that would make those ten. They would be there and that would be that."

"But the one he did when he was an old f*cking man, that geriatric one exists completely on its own in the old folks home and is never put on the same shelf next to the other 10. So it doesn’t contaminate the other 10."

It's a really interesting perspective into how Tarantino perceives filmmaking; not so much as individual projects, but more as an artistic collective. It's almost as if he considers his ten film-run one contained career, and anything he does afterward as entirely something other; suggesting any further films after the allotted ten could take on a very different identity.

A notion strengthened by his attitude towards theories he produces his works in threes; "I was listening to a podcast and there was a British critic pontificating about my work. And he said something to the degree of ‘Well, Tarantino makes movies in threes. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown. Then Kill Bill 1 – I consider Kill Bill as one movie but for the sake of his hypothesis — so Kill Bill 1, Kill Bill 2, Death Proof and then Inglorious Basterds, Django, and The Hateful Eight.'"

"(The critic) goes ‘He makes movies in threes. The first two movies are very symbiotically connected; almost complement each other in a different way. The third movie usually is linked by genre to some degree to another to the first two but it almost exists as a rebuke to the first two. It almost exists as a bastard child of the first two and is usually never as popular as the first two.’"

"He’s onto something — even the idea that the third one is almost, in its own way, a critique of the first two. And I thought that was really interesting and it held more water the more I thought about it."

The director is yet to reveal the subject of his ninth, and potentially penultimate film, though he has stated he's mulling over the idea of an outlaw tale set in 1930s Australia.