![Quentin Tarantino Talks Screenplay He Wrote For John Woo That Never Happened [Rewind]](https://www.atlaswebrise.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Quentin-Tarantino-Talks-Screenplay-He-Wrote-For-John-Woo-That-Never-Happened-Rewind.jpg "Quentin-Tarantino-Talks-Screenplay-He-Wrote-For-John-Woo-That-Never-Happened-Rewind.jpg")
A highly esteemed and beloved filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino’s every action and statement rarely escapes media attention, including our own. Every project he has ever considered has been extensively discussed. We even compiled a comprehensive Lost & Unmade project feature recounting every potential Tarantino project, no matter how brief the possibility.
But one project apparently escaped all of us and was lost to history until now. In a 1992 Toronto International Film Festival press conference for “Reservoir Dogs,” which TIFF just put on YouTube very recently, Tarantino revealed an intriguing project that never came to fruition. Tarantino, alongside Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, and Michael Madsen, discussed various topics, but one standout moment was Tarantino’s mention of a screenplay he had written for renowned Hong Kong action filmmaker John Woo (“The Killer”).
READ MORE: David Fincher To Direct Brad Pitt In ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ Sequel Written By Quentin Tarantino [Exclusive]
Tarantino described the project as a “great story” tailored for John Woo, with the intention of bringing Woo’s “unfiltered” style to American audiences. The plan was for Tarantino to complete his next screenplay, the “Pulp Fiction” script, and then move on to writing the screenplay for Woo. However, as the Academy-nominated “Pulp Fiction” took on a life of its own, the Tarantino/John Woo collaboration seemingly got lost in the shuffle.
“He’s making the best action films, bar none, since Sergio Leone,” the filmmaker said of Woo. “He’s reinventing the genre there in Hong Kong.”
“I came up with a good story,” he continued. “That’s why I did it, that’s why I’m doing it. Writing a lunkheaded action movie would be really hard work and would be doing a disservice to John Woo, but I actually came up with a good story that I think would be a good tale.”
Despite the official-sounding nature of Tarantino’s comments, there has been surprisingly little information about this project in subsequent interviews. It raises the question of whether this was the first time Tarantino ever discussed a project that never materialized, given that this was his debut film.
The idea of a Tarantino-Woo collaboration is tantalizing, given their distinct styles and contributions to cinema. Tarantino’s dialogue-driven narratives and Woo’s action-packed sequences could have created a unique cinematic experience. Unfortunately, this screenplay remains one of Hollywood’s many “what could have been” stories.
Support independent movie journalism to keep it alive. Sign up for The Playlist Newsletter. All the content you want and, oh, right, it’s free.
Given the volume of “what if?” projects Tarantino has mentioned over the years, it feels unlikely that he actually wrote the screenplay, but given that he is giving screenplays out to other filmmakers now—as he did with David Fincher giving him the sequel/continuation to “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”—who knows, maybe he could get into a creative jag and knock out the script for Woo belatedly? One can hope. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait and see what Tarantino announces as his tenth and supposedly final film.
