Quentin Tarantino is retiring from filmmaking (maybe), but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop creating art. The director has said in the past he might take up novel writing – and even that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood originally started out as a book before he turned it into a film. In a new interview with a young up-and-coming filmmaker named Martin Scorsese, Tarantino reveals he’s currently in the midst of writing a book about a subject near and dear to his heart: movies. Bet you didn’t see that one coming! In Tarantino’s novel, a WWII vet has grown to loathe the junk being pumped out by Hollywood but has his interest in cinema rekindled once he discovers the wonderful world of foreign films.

Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese each have one of the best films of the year under the belts, so it makes sense that the duo would sit down for a must-read chat via the DGA Quarterly Magazine. It’s a wide-ranging talk, with Tarantino and Scorsese discussing their careers and films in general. During the course of the conversation, Tarantino drops some info on a novel he’s writing.

“Right now, I’m working on a book,” Tarantino says. “And I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini…And so he’s like, ‘Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff.’ So he finds himself drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he doesn’t like and some of them he doesn’t understand, but he knows he’s seeing something.”

This sounds pretty damn cool, and when and if Tarantino ever publishes this thing, I will read it for sure. The jaded World War II vet character also sounds a lot like Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth from Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, although I doubt it’s supposed to be the same exact character. In any case, Tarantino goes on to say that in order to research the book, he’s “rewatching and, in some cases, watching for the first time movies I’ve heard about forever, but from my character’s perspective. So I’m enjoying watching them but I’m also [thinking], ‘How is he taking it? How is he looking at it?'”

Tarantino is the type of artist who seems to always be working on something, and as a result, some of his projects get announced but never see the light of day. With that in mind, there’s always a chance we won’t get to see this novel. But here’s hoping it hits bookshelves in the not-too-distant future because it sounds like a must-read.

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