Uma Thurman Confirms Quentin Tarantino’s Next Picture Is His “Southern” Film

Next ‘Kill Bill’ Film Is “Down The Road”

For a director known for his lengthy dialogue, Quentin Tarantino sure has been keeping quiet recently. Though he’s currently writing the screenplay for what will become the directors 8th film (or 7th, if you count the “Kill Bill” series as one, as originally intended), details have so far been hard to come by. The first murmur of news came about a month ago when Italian actor Franco Nero said Tarantino was involved with a spaghetti western called “The Angel, The Bad And The Wise” but was revealed shortly thereafter this was probably not a directorial project for him. AICN’s sources confirmed that Tarantino’s next film would be a spaghetti western, Christoph Waltz would be starring and the title Nero mentioned was not even close. Speculation then turned to the slavery-era Texas Western he had talked up during the “Inglourious Basterds” press rounds.

Tarantino said at the time, “I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern’”

Deadline caught up with the director at The Weinstein Company‘s Oscar party who confirmed he’d completed a draft of a script for his Western and would probably finish a final version within a few months. Unlike his epic screenplays for “Inglorious Basterds” and “Kill Bill” this one had “just flowed out of him,” and he expected production (set up at The Weinstein Co.) to start shortly after finishing the script. It was not, however, confirmed that this Western would be the same ‘Southern’ he had mentioned in several interviews years earlier. Hollywood Outbreak caught up with actress and Tarantino muse Uma Thurman doing press rounds for her new film “Ceremony” and when asked about the possibility of a third “Kill Bill” installment, she offered the following news.

“I think he has a script ready to start of a new film, ‘A Southern’, I think it’s really exciting. It’s another new story and a fresh piece of material that he is channeling at the moment. So I think ‘Kill Bill’ lives down the road.” So, fantastic news. This appears to be the first somewhat official confirmation that this is indeed the slavery-epic he’d been working on. In 2007 he told the British press of the early gestation of the project, “I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done,” he said at the time. “I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”

As for a third “Kill Bill,” we could take it or leave it but news of an original film from the visionary filmmaker leaves us incredibly excited. Meanwhile, “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair,” Tarantino’s long-promised full cut of the film(s), premieres tonight at the New Beverly in LA.