If Quentin Tarantino remains committed to retiring from film after his tenth feature film, then whatever film the Oscar winner decides to make next will be his big screen swan song. Christopher Nolan is disappointed.

“I think it’s dangerous to look at it so specifically,” Nolan recently told The Telegraph of Tarantino’s long-discussed 10-film retirement plan. “I mean, Quentin has his reasons, and I respect them enormously. But I hope he doesn’t stay true to them… I consider every movie I make as the last one I’ll make, and one day I’ll be right. So every time I want to put everything into the project at hand, I never think, ‘Well, I’ll save this for the next one.’ I never want to think like that. I want every movie to be everything.”

Tarantino has talked for years about his plan to retire after making 10 feature films (the “Kill Bill” films count as one film in his eyes, since they were developed and filmed as one), saying he wants to leave behind a consistently strong and carefully curated body of work.

“And you believe him?” Nolan asked the hosts of the “ReelBlend” podcast in 2023 while promoting “Oppenheimer.”

“Quentin’s point has always been that – and he’s never, very kindly, ever specific about the films he’s talking about or whatever – but he’s looking at some of the work made by filmmakers in later years and feels that if it can’t live up to its heyday, it might be better if it didn’t exist,” Nolan explained at the time. “And I think it’s a very purist point of view. It’s the point of view of a cinephile who values ​​the history of cinema.”

“I’m not sure I trust my own sense of a work’s absolute value to know whether it should have existed or not,” Nolan added. “I’m a big fan, as Quentin is, of movies that maybe don’t completely achieve what they’re trying to, but there’s something in there that’s a performance, or a little structural thing, or a scene, you know, that’s wonderful. And yeah, I get it. I think he wanted to maintain a kind of perfect reputation for something, but he also doesn’t want to take anything off the table.”

Nolan and Tarantino’s friend and fellow filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson, has been much more direct in his criticism of Tarantino’s 10-movie plan.

“I know Quintin [Tarantino] He likes to say, ‘I’m making 10 movies and then I’ll quit.’ But he could never do that,” Anderson said in 2018. “I don’t know how he could say that, or how he could take himself seriously when he says that. This is what I want to do while I can do it. As long as I can do it, I will do it. I think things can get quirky when directors maybe don’t act their age, or you see them trying to keep up with kids or trying to be trendy. “That’s never a good look.”

It remains to be seen what Tarantino has planned for his tenth and supposedly final feature film. There was a time when “The Movie Critic” was being prepared as his swan song, but Tarantino has since scrapped that script. Even if Tarantino retires, there are other artistic outlets through which he can continue to release new content. He is already the author of some books and his new play, “The Popinjay Cavalier”, will premiere in London’s West End in 2027.