According to The Playlist, Quentin Tarantino is hard at work on his next project ... but it's not clear on what that project might end up being.

Speaking at the Lumière Festival in Lyon, Tarantino revealed he’s deep in research about the year 1970….but it won’t necessarily be for a film. “Am I going to write a book? Maybe. Is it going to be a six-part podcast? Maybe. A feature documentary? Maybe. I’m figuring it out,” he said, revealing everything was a “work in progress” at the moment.

What precisely is Tarantino researching? In typical Tarantino fashion, he's got a lot to say about that, but it's still not entirely clear. For one thing, the project sounds like it'll be taking some cues from Mark Harris' book Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies And The Birth Of The New Hollywood, which Tarantino says served as something of a jumping-off point for his research.

“New Hollywood was the Hollywood and anything that even smacked of Old Hollywood was dead on arrival … the more I started going to the library and looking up newspaper articles of what it was like, I realized New Hollywood had won the revolution but whether it would survive wasn’t clear. Cinema had changed so drastically that Hollywood had alienated the family audience.” “Society demanded (the Hollywood new wave) but that doesn’t mean that they supported it as a business model and it made me realize that New Hollywood cinema from 1970-76 at the very least was actually more fragile than I thought it was. That experiment could have died in 1970."

Tarantino also says he's been reading a number of film reviews from the same period:

“That’s how I found the think pieces of the time. ‘What’s wrong with movies?’ ‘Movies have become scary,’ ‘Can Hollywood survive?' There were a lot of promises made of possibilities of a new cinema. It was almost like, could Hollywood handle this kind of freedom? Could the public handle it? The freedom seemed limitless. Directors could adapt any book, could shoot anything. There were no restrictions and that was maybe untenable.”

Bottom line: Tarantino's got a lot on his mind, and it sounds like he's got plenty to work with. The real question is what he's going to do with all of it. The idea of a limited Tarantino podcast interests me a bit, but I have to confess that I'd be way more interested in a documentary or a book. I guess if I were picking one over the other, I'd hope for the doc (my selfish fear with a Tarantino-penned book is that it'd monopolize the man's time more than these other options, and that's only going to make the wait for Tarantino's next film even longer), but that's just me.

What do you guys want to see him do with all this material? Sound off below.

(Header Image: Reused with permission from Flickr)