Quentin Tarantino is an accomplished filmmaker and, now, a best-selling author. But, first and foremost, he’s a film fan. A massive film fan. So, during interviews (which he’s doing plenty of thanks to his “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” novelization press tour), he’s quick to point out random filmmakers and features that he’s currently thinking about. In that sense, it’s easy to understand how Tarantino’s view of David O. Russell’s filmmaking career has led him to have a desire to hypothetically remake “First Blood.” Trust me, it takes a few logical leaps but Tarantino gets there.
During an interview with The Big Picture podcast, Quentin Tarantino talks about an idea he has for a remake of the classic Sylvester Stallone film, “First Blood,” which he would be happy to do because of something he saw from David O. Russell. Tarantino talks about David O. Russell, the auteur filmmaker behind some great features such as “American Hustle,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” and “The Fighter.” And it’s that last feature, “The Fighter,” which Tarantino says showed how Russell got “over himself, over being the auteur” and decided to just make “a good movie,” aka an entertaining film that audiences would eat up.
So, with that logic, Tarantino said that if he was going to just make “a good movie,” and if he wasn’t going to retire after 10 films, he would take a look at a remake of “First Blood.” Well, not a remake, per se. Instead, it would be an adaptation of David Morell’s novel “First Blood,” a book Tarantino is swift to point out is very different from the ‘Rambo’ franchise.
“I would do the novel,” he explained. “And Kurt Russell would play the sheriff, and [Adam Driver] would play Rambo. Every time I read [the novel], the dialogue is so fantastic…[The film] would be so good.”
Interestingly enough, this element of the conversation was born out of a post-“Grindhouse” era. After that movie flopped, Tarantino said he finally started to get offers to direct studio movies — he was worried about his career at the time because studios stopped sending him work-for-hire jobs a long time ago. The director says he was offered a remake of a feature version of “Westworld” written by Billy Ray (“Shattered Glass“) and an adaptation of the DC Comics character “Sgt. Rock.” that he said the script of which was “magnificent.”
“There’s a really good script that David Webb Peoples wrote for Sgt. Rock’ that I still think about doing that from time to time,” said Tarantino. “I don’t think I will, but I think it’s a really magnificent script and I would do a good job with.”
Webb Peoples of course wrote “Blade Runner” and “Unforgiven,” so someone dig up that script and send it! This convo led into the “if I just made a good script,” convo. It’s a good one. You can hear it below:
