Quentin Tarantino has revealed he plans a future writing novels and working on stage plays after he retires as a film-maker.

The Oscar-winning film-maker has been hinting since 2012 that he will retire once he has made 10 movies – forthcoming western The Hateful Eight is his eighth – but said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that he would not simply stop working.

“I’m probably only going to make 10 movies, so I’m already planning on what I’m going to do after that,” said Tarantino. “That’s why I’m counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point.



“What I want to do basically is I want to write novels and I want to write theatre and I want to direct theatre. I actually want to do a theatrical adaptation of Hateful Eight because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that.”

The Hateful Eight trailer

Tarantino also said he liked the idea of a stage version of Reservoir Dogs, his 1992 debut, which he said “could be put onstage and has been put onstage many times”. He said seeing The Hateful Eight performed as a stage reading prior to the new film’s shoot had helped assure him the movie was ready to move forward, adding: “I wouldn’t be so confident with thinking about the idea of exhibition that early on if I weren’t that confident with the material.”

Meanwhile, the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone has denied ever criticising Tarantino’s use of music after being hired to score The Hateful Eight. Speaking through an interpreter to the BBC, Morricone, 87, said a 2013 comment in which he was quoted as saying the film-maker “places music in his films without coherence” should not have been attributed to him.

The composer said he had no problem with Tarantino using his previously recorded music for movies such as Kill Bill and Django Unchained. “On the contrary, I was very, very flattered,” he said. “The fact that my music, which had been written for other films, could be adapted to the poetry of Quentin Tarantino’s film-making was a great gift for me.



“The only thing I criticised of Quentin Tarantino was a single scene in a single movie which, for me, was too violent and too ghastly. I couldn’t watch it,” added Morricone, who scored The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West and For a Few Dollars More. “People should pay a lot of attention when they write something down.”

Booking now ... Quentin Tarantino at The Hateful Eight premiere Photograph: Splash News/Splash News/Splash News/Corbis

Morricone’s work on The Hateful Eight marks the first time Tarantino has commissioned a full score for one of his movies, rather than relying on previously existing music. The director described the experience as a a “once in a lifetime thing” at a Q&A session at Abbey Road studios in London on Thursday ahead of The Hateful Eight’s UK premiere. Referring to Morricone as “the maestro”, he revealed the composer was given just a month to complete the score, because the western had already been completed when he received the assignment.



“He thought I hadn’t started shooting yet, so he was talking to me and I was like: ‘No I’m done shooting and I need the score in a month,’” said Tarantino. “I have been to a few premieres … but this is a once in a lifetime thing and I’m just happy to have a front row seat.”