The reason Quentin Tarantino and his family will soon be leaving Israel

Hollywood film director Quentin Tarantino will debut a new original play of his own writing next year in London’s West End, the city’s historic theater district.

[Tarantino appeared on the ALL ISRAEL NEWS list of notable Israelis to watch in 2023.]

In a two-hour interview on his fan podcast, The Church of Tarantino, published on Friday, Tarantino revealed that due to the planned stage production, he and his wife, [Israeli model and singer] Daniella Pick, and their two children, Leo and Adriana, are expected to relocate soon to England.

“I’m really enjoying my time with my kids and my family,” Tarantino shared in the interview. “Just let me spend the rest of this year with my family. Then I’ll probably move to England and bring my family along with me to work on the play.”

“The play is already fully written,” said the 62-year-old director. “That’s definitely the next thing I’m going to do. It’s absolutely my next project. We’ll start moving the process forward in January. It’ll probably take a year and a half to two years of my life. Because if it succeeds and I have to do a world tour and all of that – I’m preparing for it to be a success. If it fails, then I’ll wrap it up pretty quickly. But even starting from scratch, it’ll probably take about a year before it gets in front of an audience. The current idea is to stage it at the West End.”

“When my daughter comes home from kindergarten, the first thing she says is ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ because she hasn’t seen me all day – and I love being there,” Tarantino said of his family life. “I have time to do my own things until the kids come home from kindergarten and after they go to sleep. My wife says I exaggerate a little, because I do sneak away for two hours for my own stuff. But most of the time I’m there until they fall asleep, and that’s just very precious to me. In three or four years, maybe it’ll be a little less precious. They’ll start to grow up, have their own friends – so now is not the time to run off with the circus.”

In the interview, Tarantino also explained why he chose to shelve his screenplay, "The Movie Critic," which was supposed to be his tenth – and last – feature film, if he keeps his long-standing promise to stop directing full-length films after 10.

“I wasn’t really excited to shoot what I’d written when the film entered early production, partly because of a skill I developed in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" – how to turn Los Angeles into 1969 Hollywood without using CGI,” he explained. “That was something we absolutely had to achieve. It wasn’t certain we could pull it off. In The Movie Critic, there was nothing like that to crack. I already knew more or less how to turn L.A. into an older version of itself. It felt too similar to the previous film.”

Tarantino said "The Movie Critic" was set in 1977 and initially began as an 8-part TV series, a project he had hinted at back in 2022. He clarified that the script had no connection to "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," despite rumors. However, he noted that he may return to the project in the future if he changes his mind, since the script is already written.

“The thing about The Movie Critic is that I really, really like it,” he said. “But I set myself a challenge when I wrote it: ‘Can I take the most boring profession in the world and turn it into an interesting film?’ Who would want to watch a series about a movie critic? Who would want to see a film called The Movie Critic? That was the challenge. If I can actually make a movie or series about someone whose whole life is watching films into something compelling –that’s an achievement. And I think I pulled it off.”

The director went on to say that he began working on "The Adventures of Cliff Booth," the sequel to "The Movie Critic," shortly after deciding to shelve it. The new Netflix production, currently filming in Los Angeles, was written and produced by Tarantino but is being directed by David Fincher.

“I think David Fincher and I are the two best directors,” Tarantino said on the podcast. “So the very idea that David Fincher actually wants to adapt something I created – for me, that shows a level of seriousness about my work that I think deserves to be recognized.”