Quentin Tarantino Admits Regret Over Never Making This Movie

Quentin Tarantino has made some of the most famous movies of the last 30 years, but there’s one film he still thinks about and wishes he could have made.

On The Church of Tarantino podcast, he talked about the project he regrets not doing: an adaptation of The Outfit, a 1963 crime novel by Donald Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark.

Tarantino said the film was meant to be made in the six-year gap between Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill (2003). He described it as “the one project that stays in my mind” and admitted he felt a twinge of regret that it never happened.

“There’s a part of me that kinda wishes, now that they’re older and they can’t do it, there’s a part of me that kinda wishes I could have done that,” he said.

The Outfit tells the story of Parker, a professional thief who takes on the mob after they betray him. Parker is methodical, cold, and extremely skilled, hitting the criminal underworld with one heist after another.

The book is known for its sharp, precise storytelling and the way Parker’s quiet, deadly intelligence forces the entire underworld to respect—or fear—him. The novel was first adapted into a film in 1973, starring Robert Duvall as Parker, with Joe Don Baker as Cody and Karen Black as Bett Harrow.

The movie, though not as widely remembered as some other crime films of the 1970s, has been praised by modern critics and often appears on lists of underappreciated classics alongside films like The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

In the late 1990s, Tarantino imagined a dream cast for his version. Robert De Niro would have played Parker, Harvey Keitel would have been Cody, and Pam Grier would have taken the role of Bett Harrow.

It would have been a reunion of sorts for Tarantino, who had worked with both De Niro and Keitel before, and it would have brought Grier back after her iconic role in Jackie Brown.

Instead, the Parker character, or thinly veiled versions of him, went on to be played by other actors. Mel Gibson starred in Payback, Jason Statham in Parker, and Mark Wahlberg in Play Dirty. Tarantino said he could have gotten there first but never did.

Even though he doesn’t usually admit regrets, he acknowledged that The Outfit would have been the perfect movie at the perfect time if he had made it between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He also wrote about the 1973 version in his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, highlighting its importance in crime cinema history and its influence on modern filmmakers.

For Tarantino, The Outfit remains a movie that could have been one of the greats, a project that haunts him in the best possible way.

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