Some of the greatest directors in cinema history didn't feel the need to write their own scripts, but Quentin Tarantino will never be among their number, even if he did seriously consider it once.
Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Howard Hawks, David Fincher, Clint Eastwood, and Mike Nichols have screenwriting credits that range from 'zero' to 'not many', and every single one of them still directed at least one movie regarded among the best ever made.
After Reservoir Dogs had taken the independent scene by storm in 1992, Tarantino was inundated with director-for-hire gigs. The way the industry usually works is that a filmmaker with one or two acclaimed lower-budget pictures under their belt will make the leap to blockbusters, but he wasn't interested.
All of his pictures have been self-penned, and Jackie Brown is the only one that was based on pre-existing material. This being Tarantino, he's toyed with all sorts of projects that were either adaptations, remakes, or tied to things that had already happened, but he turned his nose up at them to focus on telling original stories.
He's far from the only auteur to build their career entirely around scripts that come from nowhere else but their own imagination, but he did admit his head could be turned. The prospect of the two-time Academy Award winner helming a comic book adaptation is nigh-on unthinkable today, but he used to flirt with them all the time.
None of them went too far beyond the starting blocks, and he'd have most likely rewritten them himself anyway. However, when he caught wind of a draft focusing on a DC Comics character hailing from the scribe of two stone-cold classics, Tarantino gave it some serious thought, if only for a moment.
"There is a script, I'm not going to do it, that I always really liked a lot by David Webb Peoples, who wrote Unforgiven and Blade Runner," he shared with New York Magazine. "He wrote a movie version of Sgt Rock that I always thought was really terrific." In the same breath, he admitted that he didn't think he would ever end up doing it, but still, he "really did like that script" and thought about directing it.
If it was announced today that Tarantino was helming a comic book movie based on a script that he didn't write, it would be a sure sign that hell was about to freeze over. Sgt Rock had been lodged in development hell long before the Pulp Fiction mastermind laid his eyes on it, and it's still there, so he definitely made the right call in refusing to commit.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had been circling the title role in the late 1980s, and when that version eventually went up in smoke, Guy Ritchie was named as the director in 2008. He bailed, too, and the following year, Francis Lawrence got the job. That iteration soon vanished into the ether, with Luca Guadagnino taking over in 2024, before Colin Farrell signed on for the lead, dropped out, and was replaced by Daniel Craig, who also dropped out, with Sgt Rock remaining in a state of uncertainty at James Gunn's DC Studios.