Quentin Tarantino is alive and well, and living in Tel Aviv, despite reports attributed to the website Deadline.com that he had been killed in an Iranian missile attack.
The site reported that “sources close to” the Oscar-winning director/screenwriter/novelist, who has made such films as Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, told them that a social-media post that announced his death was fake news. Deadline.com also said that it had never reported his death, even though some claimed that it had.
Photos purporting to show Tarantino, who is married to singer/actress Daniella Pick and lives with her and their two children in Tel Aviv, sitting in a bomb shelter, were also fake, Deadline said. They also spend time in Los Angeles, although they were in Tel Aviv during the pandemic and most of the war.
The Israeli website N12 posted a photo showing Tarantino, who is frequently spotted when Israel isn’t under missile attack, attending movies at Cinema City Glilot and walking and biking around the city, strolling through a public park in Tel Aviv with a coffee cup in his hand last week.
Tarantino writes original, old-fashioned British farce
New details were announced by The Daily Mail over the weekend about Tarantino’s next project, a play that will be produced on London’s West End. The Daily Mail reported: “The stranger-than-fiction truth is that Tarantino has written an original, old-fashioned British farce, in the door-slamming, trouser-dropping, mistaken identity vein of Brian Rix or Ray Cooney…It is not based on any of his films. It is a farce, in the British Noises Off tradition.” The play will hit the stage by 2027, possibly by late 2026, according to the UK newspaper.
The Daily Mail said he is negotiating with Hollywood stars to appear in the stage play: “None of his usual troupe – like Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt – have a remotely theatrical background, so it will be fascinating to see who he turns to. He could pick someone like Bradley Cooper, who took the lead in a West End production of The Elephant Man a decade ago.”
When the news broke that Tarantino would be directing a play he had written in London, he told a podcast, The Church of Tarantino, that he would be moving with his family to England for the run of the play. But Pick said in an Instagram post that this was not true, and that while she and the children might visit London, they would not be moving there. “There’s no place like home,” she wrote.
In an interview with Channel 12 in December, Pick said her husband, whom she married in 2018, did not get stressed over missile attacks. “Most of the time, he wouldn't even go down to the shelter if I didn't tell him, and … He isn't afraid, and once he said something funny to me: 'Well, whatever. Like if something happens, I'll die as a Zionist.'”
It was announced a few months ago that he would direct a film called The Adventures of Cliff Booth for Netflix, which continues the adventures of the character played by Pitt in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. But although Tarantino wrote the script, David Fincher directed the movie.
A previously announced film, The Movie Critic, about a Los Angeles film reviewer that Tarantino said he would make, was scrapped. There is much interest in his next project, because the director has said that he will make just one more film.
Pick is busy with her own upcoming project, her first major role as an actress, in The Perfect Gamble, which just premiered in Hollywood, and was directed by Danny A. Abeckaser.
The Perfect Gamble is about a high-stakes gambler who gets involved with the local mafia at a casino in Tbilisi, and Pick’s co-stars are Abeckaser and David Arquette, who is best known for the Scream franchise. She will also star in another film by Abeckaser, about the pager operation in Lebanon, which is set for worldwide release, though a date has not yet been announced.