Luc Besson Accuses Tarantino of Stealing His Signature Idea

Summary:

• Quentin Tarantino has recently announced he’s going to retire after making his 10th movie
• Luc Besson, however, believes that the legendary filmmaker has stolen his idea

Quentin Tarantino is one of Hollywood's favorites not only thanks to his rule-breaking films’ stunning success, but also to some specific ways of work that he chose quite a long ago. The director has never hidden the fact that his filmography will consist of exactly 10 films — and only then he will happily retire.

Now that Tarantino’s tenth film is already on its way to the production set, another famous director claims that Tarantino isn’t actually the first one to come up with this idea.

While talking on The Discourse Podcast, Luc Besson, prominent for his films like Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, has revealed that Tarantino copied him as Besson initially shared the idea of retiring after 10 films with Tarantino years ago — and then he made it his own.

According to Besson, he had this talk with the Kill Bill’s director back in the 1990s, when the French filmmaker “had made six or seven films” while his colleague had already released Reservoir Dogs and was coming up with the idea of Pulp Fiction.

And though Besson didn’t stick to his initial plan as his 21st film got released last year, he seemingly even had a distinct understanding of his “10 films” concept.

As Besson added later on in the podcast, he looked at the retirement idea as a way to concentrate on high-quality movies rather than dispersing his time on numerous useless movies.

“If I have only ten bullets, I have to be careful with the last three,” he said.

Thus, the director was trying to keep himself from tempting studio offers that come from Hollywood.

Unlike Tarantino, who got truly inspired by the supposedly borrowed idea and still hasn’t changed his mind, Besson seems to have put the retirement thought out of his head at least for a couple of upcoming years.

As the director admitted, he still plans to bring two or three scripts to the screens — and then he'll stop (or maybe not).

Source: The Playlist