Quentin Tarantino Needs to Quit His 10-Film Cap

His obsession with legacy is leading him to make decisions out of fear.

Quentin Tarantino is a great director. Even if you don’t like his movies, it’s difficult to deny that he’s had a singular, distinctive vision for his films since he burst on the scene in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs. He cares deeply about film as an art form and perhaps even more about film history.

And yet he’s basing a major career decision on an arbitrary number of movies he’ll make before retiring. From an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tarantino claimed that directors tend to drop off as they get older, and he wanted to go out on top:

“I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f—s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”

Although there are certainly directors who faded as they got older, Tarantino knows that’s not always the case. Is Robert Altman’s best movie A Prairie Home Companion? No, but it’s not a bad movie, and it’s a movie that’s about looking at the end of your life, something that could only be expressed by an elderly director with decades of experience under his belt. Martin Scorsese, a director who loves movies and film history as much if not more than Tarantino, has been making some of his best work in his later years. If Scorsese had stopped after ten, his last movie would have been The Color of Money, which is quite good, but it’s not at the dizzying highs of Goodfellas.