“When I’m in America, I’m writing. When I’m in Israel? I’m an abba, which is Hebrew for father,” said Quentin Tarantino, the Oscar-winning director/writer, in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival.
Tarantino, known for such groundbreaking hit films as Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, currently spends much of his time in his home in the Ramat Aviv Gimmel neighborhood in the Tel Aviv area.
Variety reported on an interview he did in front of an audience with film critic Elvis Mitchell at Sundance on Monday, saying that he flew to the US just for this appearance. Tarantino has a long connection to Sundance because it was there that his first feature film, Reservoir Dogs, premiered in 1992. The violent, profane crime thriller was the talk of the festival and was acquired by Miramax, Harvey Weinstein’s production and distribution company.
No one could have predicted then that Tarantino’s future would include marriage to an Israeli singer/model/actress, Daniella Pick, and that he would have two children with her: a son, Leo, and a daughter, Adriana.
Asked by Mitchell when he will start making his next movie, which he insists will be his last, he said, “I’m in no hurry to actually jump into production. I’ve been doing that for 30 years. Next month, my son turns 5, and I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.”
Kids are his priority
Variety quoted him as saying that spending time with his children was his priority right now: “The idea of jumping on a voyage when they’re too young to understand it is not enticing to me. I kind of want to not do whatever movie I end up doing until my son is at least 6. That way he’ll know what’s going on, he’ll be there, and it will be a memory for the rest of his life.” Adriana, he said, “is already such a genius, she’ll just get it.”
Pick, the daughter of the late iconic singer Svika Pick, will soon have her first starring role in a movie called The Perfect Gamble, directed by Danny A. Abeckaser. It also stars Abeckaser and David Arquette of the Scream series as two gamblers who open a casino when they get out of prison. Pick plays the woman in their lives.
Tarantino said that he was currently working on a play and was disenchanted with the film business in the streaming era. About writing a play, he said, “That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the f*** is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four f***ing weeks? All right, and by the second week, you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns.”
The last film he released was the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, about an actor and stuntman in Los Angeles during the Charles Manson era, and he has published two books in the past few years, a novelization of the Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood screenplay, and a memoir about the movies that shaped him, Cinema Speculation.
He is often seen biking around Tel Aviv and going to movies at Cinema City Glilot. When the war broke out in 2023, he went to an IDF army base and posed for photos with soldiers.
It was previously reported that Tarantino’s final screenplay would be about a movie critic, but he said that he abandoned that script.